Lustra: Episode 2 - Hangman, Turn Your Head Awhile
by agelade
Summary: Episode 2 in Lustra, a Supernatural Season 9 AU. Death comes knocking with a favor to ask of the boys. In exchange, he promises to fix Sam up, good as new. But Sam isn't on board with making another shady deal, and this one puts them on the trail of someone with special protection from Death himself. Recommended to be read after Episode 1 in the same series.
1. Chapter 1

PSA: Guys, you should already be reading Boogeyman, by Caladrius. But if you are not! The stories of this Season 9 consider that story to be canon, and this chapter of this episode in particular references elements of that story. IF you want to understand Dean's issue with "planes crap," go read Boogeyman. If you don't care about Dean's issue with "planes crap," go read Boogeyman anyway. Go read Boogeyman, because it's awesome.

We now return you to your (ir)regularly scheduled fic.

* * *

Lustra: A _Supernatural_ Season 9 AU  
Episode 902  
"Hangman, Turn Your Head Awhile"

Chapter One

**PREVIOUSLY, on **_**Supernatural**_**:**

"Well that was a bust," Dean said, scrubbing his hand over his face. So, an angel couldn't help Sam. Or, at least this one couldn't. Great.

"Indeed," came a voice from near the kitchen.

Dean was out of his chair in an instant, already reaching for the gun he knew wasn't tucked into his waistband. This was supposed to be a safe place, dammit. On the far side of the room, Sam spun and pushed Kevin behind him, gasping for breath at the movement, but battle-ready, demon blade out.

Death watched them a moment, amused, apparently, then swept into the room. "Looking for miracles again, I see." He narrowed his eyes at Sam across the room, then smiled brightly at Dean. "Lucky for you, I have a favor to ask."

**NOW:**

"How did you get in here?"

"Dean," Death said, smiling. "There's nowhere I can't get into. I'm _Death_." He looked around the bunker appraisingly, nodding around like he was all pleased they'd gotten such a good sturdy hidey hole. "Sam. Please."

Sam heaved breaths over there at the far wall just in front of the stairs leading down, knife out, but at Death's patient reminder, he dropped the knife to his side and stood up out of his fighting stance, looking embarrassed to have drawn down on the Big Guy himself.

"That's better. Oh, Castiel," Death said, nodding at Cas who'd fled into the corner with Lethaniel. "Nice to see you again. Don't worry." Death smiled cheerfully. "Not here to swat you. Not yet, anyway."

"What _are _you doing here?" Dean said.

"Cutting right to the chase, are we? I'm here to help Sam, of course."

Dean looked back at Sam to shrug at him, but Sam was already frowning at him in accusation.

"Dean? What did you do."

"Nothing, what, Jesus."

"Yeah, right." Sam looked at Death. "Whatever he promised you, don't do it. It isn't worth it."

Death chuckled softly. "Well now, aren't you just a ball of sunshine. Dean didn't promise me anything, Sam. I told you. I need a favor. Is someone going to get me a nice cold drink, or-"

"I got it!" Kevin said, fleeing through the war room and into the kitchen in record time and leaving Sam stranded.

"Kevin-!" Dean hissed, but Sam seemed to be angry enough that he could walk himself more or less steadily back to the table and slam into a chair like he was sixteen and pissed at Dean for breathing.

"You don't seem like you believe me, Sam," Death said.

"That's not it." Sam shook his head and spared the angels cowering in the corner a dirty look. "I just want to be left alone for like... several years. That's all."

Death pressed his lips together and strolled around the conference room, inspecting old Men of Letters paraphernalia hanging on the walls. "And who could blame you. But the fact is, we can help each other, or I wouldn't be here."

"What do you need?" Sam and Dean said together. Sam made a face at Dean, but Dean grinned and Death chuckled.

"I need you to find someone for me."

"What is it?" Dean asked. "Spirit or something corporeal?"

Sam rolled his eyes and Dean's singsong tone as he pronounced the word. "Isn't _finding someone_ a little below your pay grade?" Sam said.

"Usually," Death agreed. "But the man I'm looking for has some special protection."

"Protection. Against you?" Dean said. "Great. Definitely sounds like someone we wanna tangle with. Kevin, a couple of beers while you're at it!"

"It's not so much dangerous as it is simply... impossible for me to do myself. Come on, Dean. I heard somewhere that you'd do anything for your brother."

"Yeah." Dean regarded Death. He seemed easy-going, relaxed. Just wandering around waiting for his frosty beverage. But the fact was, this thing was older than dirt, older than God, and hadn't seemed thrilled with them last time they'd all been in a room together. "About that. I thought you said one wall per customer."

Sam relaxed into his chair, slouched down, stared at the table. Dean knew he was listening because he had his thoughtful eyebrows pinched together like he was solving some complicated word math or something, even if he tried to look like he could care less.

Death smiled benignly in Sam's direction and Dean wondered briefly if Death somehow had a pain in the ass little brother too. "I'm sure we can work something out."

"What's the job," Sam said, still staring at the table.

"I need you to find Enoch."

Dean frowned. Sam actually looked up, those working brows high over wide eyes.

"Enoch. Guy who never died, _Biblical_ Enoch?" he said.

"Got it in one."

"Why?"

Death shrugged. "Pride?" He turned to them as Kevin was coming into the room juggling a glass of something and a couple of beers and a whiskey for himself. Dean took both beers and slid one across the table to Sam.

"Pride?" Sam scoffed.

"Take this as a compliment, _please_," Dean half-prayed, "but you seem kinda... above pride."

Death pressed his lips into a line. "_Professional_ pride then, if you like," he suggested. "Everyone dies, Dean."

Sam laughed derisively. "I'll believe that when I see it."

Dean waggled his eyebrows insistently at Sam, but Sam didn't seem to care that he was taunting the guy who promised to end them the next time they asked for help.

Death, however, merely smiled again at the petulant thirty-year-old grown-ass-man like he was a child up past bedtime, like he might give Sam a little rough affectionate noogie on his way out or pinch his cheeks or something. "My number's in your phones. Give me a call if you have questions or want to give me a progress report."

"Wait. We haven't said we'll do this," Sam said.

Dean frowned. "Of course we'll do it, are you nuts?"

"Yeah, any day now, apparently. But Dean, we can't keep making deals like this. You know how this goes."

Dean stood, flexing his hands into fists in frustration. "Sam, goddammit, we don't have a lot of options."

Death smiled kindly. "Sam's right. You can't keep throwing yourself into deals like this. Luckily, I'm completely trustworthy. I have absolutely no desire to meddle in the machinations of the things that want to rule this little planet. And if I didn't genuinely like you both, you'd have been smears on the walls after the last time we met. I have absolutely no reason to lie to you. This will probably be the safest deal you've ever negotiated."

"You're _Death_," Sam pointed out.

Death smiled again. "Well-spotted."

Sam, at the end of his ability to bitch, looked to Dean for support, and while Dean agreed with him in spirit or on principle or whatever, the fact was, Dean would do anything, remember, to save Sam's life.

"Tick tick tick," Death prompted. "I'm afraid Sam's going to go downhill fast this time."

"We're in," Dean said. Sam was staring at Death, face white at the casual assertion that he wasn't long for these unpadded walls. But he recovered himself at Dean's agreement and opened his mouth to find something else he could complain about, and Dean held up a hand. "We're in and that's final. You need this guy's coordinates or what?"

Death shrugged. "Bring me whatever you can find. I'll be in touch."

He sauntered into the library, and when Dean poked his head through to check, the tall gaunt man was gone.

"Looks like we're not completely out of options after all," Dean said.

"This is a terrible idea," Sam complained.

Kevin skirted the table double fisting Death's soda and his own whiskey and said, "That was _Death_?"

"Yeah," Dean said with a sigh, "We've got... history."

* * *

"Okay, ready for the data dump?"

"I love it when you do all the work." Dean leaned back in his chair, pushing away from the books and dust, and spread his arms to the sides to stretch. "Hit me."

Sam came fully into the room reading from a book. Three more cradled his book of choice, each open to pages Sam had apparently thought were important. He looked better, less pale, was walking on his own, and books were heavy. Dean sipped from his beer and soaked in the rare moment when Sam was more or less healthy and totally in his element.

"We know Enoch was a Biblical figure favored by God. He didn't die, was 'taken'-"

"Whatever that means."

"Right, no, exactly," Sam said, shuffling to another book. "In the original Greek, the verb does mean taken, but it also means raised, ascended."

"So he's in Heaven?"

"I don't think so. Death would probably know that."

"So... where then?"

"Okay. So first I thought... another plane - Dean-"

Dean was already throwing his hands up. "More planes crap, Sammy-"

"Dean that was like, seven years ago, okay, and-"

"If you start talking math at me again, I swear to God Sam-"

"Would you just calm down?"

Dean cast his eyes to the skies and shook his head. "Fine. You think this Enoch guy is on another plane?"

Sam struggled only a moment to get the books down to the table without dropping them all. Dean let him struggle, because Sam gave him that bitchy look whenever he thought Dean was mothering him too much, and if he wanted to be a brat, he could just keep dropping things. That was fine with Dean. If he wanted to keep going pale and breathing hard just because he _needed_ to carry half the library into the war room _all by himself_, fine. So what if he fell into his chair rather than sit like a normal person, so what if his hands shook. Dean rolled his eyes.

Sam blew out a shaky breath, focused on the task at hand. "I'm not sure. It's an idea."

"Okay," Dean said, eyeing the rest of the books. "Well, I _am_ sure you didn't bring me an entire library just to support this 'maybe planes' thing."

"No," he said, clipped. He scanned the pages of half a dozen open books, in addition to the three he'd just plopped down as he spoke. "Enoch was the father of Methuselah-"

"Nine hundred year old witch, right."

"_Dad_ thought he was a witch. Other accounts just say he was favored by God."

"Wonder what that feels like."

Sam didn't look up from his book. "Well, we do seem to not-die a lot."

"Good point. Anyway, Metamucil-"

"Methuselah. Not a witch. The Biblical accounts say that Enoch was beloved by God, who didn't want him to have to suffer death. So if God let Enoch live for so long, maybe he extended that favor to Methuselah because he didn't want Enoch to have to grieve his son."

"But Methuselah _did_ die," Dean pointed out.

"Yeah, right before the flood."

Dean raised a brow at Sam's _what isn't clear about this_ face. "So?"

"Methuselah was Noah's grandfather, and his name literally means 'when he dies, judgment.' He dies, Noah and his family are the only people saved from a flood. Basically, Apocalypse the First." Sam looked at Dean, mouth open to say something. Then he snapped it shut, visibly resituated himself within his research, and frowned at another page.

"Spit it out, Sam," Dean said.

"Nothing. Nevermind."

Dean rolled his eyes. "So what makes Enoch so special?"

Sam shrugged that smartass _how do you not know this?_ shrug. "Maybe because he _invented_ Enochian?"

Dean frowned. "Like. _Enochian_ Enochian?"

"Yeah. Like, angel language, unknown and unknowable to humans unless they're prophets."

"You think Enoch was a prophet?"

Sam sighed heavy and shrugged. "Who knows. Practically anyone who could do math and read stars was considered a prophet back then." Sam flipped his books shut and leaned back in his chair, massaged his eyes with the heels of his hands.

"So then what do we do?"

"I don't know, Dean. Give up because it's a lost cause and also, newsflash, it's a terrible idea?"

"Saving your life is a terrible idea?"

"Yeah," Sam shot back. "Maybe it is."

"Save the dramatics, okay. Just tell me what else you found out-"

Sam looked up at him then. "Nothing. I stopped looking."

"What?"

"Maybe you didn't hear what I just said. Flood. Apocalypse. Ring a bell? Dean-"

"So you just brought all this crap in here to what, prove a point?"

"I'm just saying, we know Death wants Enoch for some other reason than just pride, right?"

"Well, obviously-"

"Yes. Obviously. And whatever it is, it's probably not good, and we're probably playing right into his hands, or someone's hands, and it's probably a big mistake to help him, and there goes the world all over again."

"Sam-"

Sam looked up at him. "You think it's the right choice because _you're _the one making it. If it was me, you know you'd be questioning it, you'd be questioning _me_. So don't give me this attitude, okay? I don't have the energy to fight about it."

"Then stop fighting, Sam. Just let me do this. I don't care if this plays into some big evil plan. I don't care if the world goes to shit. I'm not letting you go through this again. If I can fix it-"

"Dean." Sam lowered his eyes to the books in front of him. "I don't want to be responsible for the end of the world again. Please - _please_ don't do that to me."

"Sam, Jesus-"

"I'm just saying. If it turns out that saving my life this time results in... whatever, some big world-ending plan, then..."

"Then what?"

"It won't matter that you saved my life." Sam looked up at him.

Dean swallowed, mouth dry. Sam wasn't over this teen dramacide thing, and Dean hadn't really paid attention to those afterschool specials, but he was hoping it'd be as simple as "tell him he's pretty and everything will be fixed." He should have known better.

"I'll just have to make sure the world doesn't end, then," Dean said.

Sam laughed. "Cuz that's worked for us in the past," he said. "Listen. I know you want to help. But this is it for me, okay? I'm tired, man. I'm done. I'm done."

"You're done when I say you're done," Dean said. "Come on, we're going."

"Where?"

"To get clues, info, whatever. Get you out among the living."

Sam sighed again. He put his hands on the table, stared at it and looked so tired and just _finished_ with everything. "No, Dean- Just. No. I'm not going anywhere."

"Yes you are."

Sam smiled. "You can't make me, Dean. We aren't kids anymore."

* * *

He'd gone to bed shortly after. Checked on Crowley, chatted uneasily with Cas after panic sounded alarms in his head - _no, Cas, it's okay, you're not falling, you're not to blame_ - and he wasn't sure he'd ever get used to being _prayed_ to. Kevin tried to get his attention, but he could see Dean's fingerprints all over that and so Sam waved him off with a vague excuse about needing sleep.

And he had needed sleep. Because there at the edges was a voice telling him what was real and what wasn't, and it wasn't a voice he could trust.

But he was fairly certain that he'd gone to bed in his own actual _bed_, and not the passenger seat of the Impala.

He blinked blearily. Out of the window, there were evergreens and morning-blue sky and a couple of roadside shops that looked like houses. He peered out; before and behind them stretched the road, some long indeterminate stripe on the landscape. In the backseat, his backpack.

Sam blinked down at his watch, his head swerved dangerously.

Oh. Goddammit.

The driver's side door creaked open.

"Morning sunshine!" Dean cheered.

"Dean, what-" Sam tried to - punch Dean? Flip him off? Smack him limply in the arm? Instead of doing any of that, he lurched half into the driver's seat and the world spun.

"Whoa whoa, easy fella," Dean said, and a moment later he was reaching in to resettle Sam against the passenger door. He reached back up again and when he slammed the door shut a moment later, he was in the driver's seat, two coffees in hand. He fit one of them into Sam's limp grip. "Drink up. You'll feel better."

"You kimmapme." Woo his lips felt flappy. He blinked hard.

"Yep."

"Deam. This is ams... absurb... s'dumb."

"Sam. Drink. Caffeine'll help." Dean turned the key in the ignition and the Impala flared to life.

Sam drank, on autopilot. Because even if he _was_ being kidnapped by his own brother, coffee was a must in the morning. When the cup was half empty and his mouth seemed like it would obey him, he tried again.

"Dean."

"Good job."

"This is ridiculous."

"Yeah, but I won't hold it against you."

Sam rolled his eyes. "Where are we even going?"

"Boston."

"What's in Boston?"

"John Winthrop's grave."

Sam sighed. Dean in this mood was infuriating. "Who's John Winthrop?"

"The guy John Dee hid his missing journal with."

"John Dee?"

"Yeah, he was the last guy known to speak Enochian-"

"I know."

"You did?"

Sam leaned his head back against the headrest. "Yeah. John Dee, 16th century alchemist who communed with 'angels' to write down Enochian."

"Asshole. It took me like two hours to find that out."

"You should've just googled it. What's the Winthrop connection?"

"You coming around?"

Sam shook his head and looked out of the passenger side window. "Just making conversation. So?" He peered at Dean when he didn't answer. Dean glanced at him and back at the road, uneasy. "Dean?"

"I might have... asked John Dee."

Sam drew his brows together. "Ouija? Dean-"

"Lay off, Grumpy. I didn't summon a demon or something, Jesus." He shook his head. "I just made a guess he might still be hanging around haunting something, dusted off the old spirit-talker. Get off your high horse, Sam. It's not like you never used one."

"I was trying to talk to _you_, Dean, and you weren't _dead_."

"Well I wouldn't have had to use it at all if you were with me on this, Sam!"

"If you'd just honor my wishes-"

"Goddammit, Sam, you're not dead! I don't have to honor shit!"

Sam stopped. Whatever remark he'd readied in retaliation died on his tongue.

"Just help me think through this, okay?" Dean said, calming. "John Dee said he found a key to something, something about a ... an eternal walk - I don't know. I can't read that ancient crap."

Sam rolled his eyes. "Renaissance era is hardly 'ancient.' Wait. 'Eternal walk?' Like-"

"Like maybe he was looking for Enoch too? Yeah."

Sam closed his eyes against a sudden bout of nausea he hoped was caused by the sleeping pill he suspected Dean had slipped him. "You said you found evidence of a missing journal?"

"Yeah, something with the key in it, or... something. I got it all back there for you to sort through."

"So, we're driving to Boston on a hunch, basically."

"Basically."

"Okay." Sam pulled out his phone and dialed. When the other end picked up, he said: "Hey Crowley. I need you to come get me."

Dean frowned and jerked the car to the side of the road.

"_No can do, Moosie. Can't find you."_

"What do you mean you can't find me," Sam said, giving Dean's driving a dirty look.

"You'll never find it," Dean said, and Sam rolled his eyes.

"Yeah," he said to Crowley. "Hex bag. Try Dean."

Dean stared at Sam and mouthed _dude_, betrayal in his face. Crowley appeared in the back seat.

"You rang for car service, Moose?"

"Yeah. Let's go."

Crowley looked over at Dean, clearly confused. Sam got out of the car, frowned at the untied shoes on his sockless feet. Gross. Dean got out of the driver's side to complain, But Sam cut him off. "I told you, Dean. I'm done." He wrenched the back door open to grab for his backpack. "Crowley, home, now."

Crowley climbed out of the car and twisted his mouth at Dean in accusation. He started for Sam, but Dean lurched forward.

"Wait! Wait, Crowley. Don't. Hear me out."

"Dean," Sam started.

"I'm trying to save your _life_, Sam. Crowley, wait. Wait. Sam's got this death wish, okay. But I can save him."

"From this mystery ailment," Crowley spat.

"_Yes_," Dean said.

Sam frowned. He tried not to be surprised no one had told Crowley about Lucifer. But whether he was hurt by it or grateful, he didn't know. Either way, he didn't want- _Don't do it, Dean. Don't-_

But Dean took a breath and Sam knew-

"It's Lucifer. In his head. And if we don't do this, he'll die. He'll die, Crowley. But first, he'll suffer."

Crowley looked at Sam, brows up over his dark eyes. Oh yes, Crowley knew of the cage, at least enough to have once fooled them all into thinking he'd been the one to pull Sam out. But Sam doubted even King of Hell Crowley had seen the thing, the vastness, the cantilevered, inverted, perverted, _unknowable_ geometry of it. It was so isolated, situated in the cold, dead center of Hell, eternity up and down and to all sides, suspended in void and unapproachable by demon or angel alike who wasn't _meant_ to be there (which means you, Sammy, oh that means we were _meant to be-_).

And then Dean slammed his fist into the roof of the car hard enough to bang Sam out of his own head and Sam jumped and gasped and Crowley's concerned frown deepened.

Dean gestured at him as evidence, and Sam tried to calm his breathing, because the last thing he wanted was to give Dean ammunition. But Dean got his ammunition anyway, and slapped the roof of the Impala again and Sam jumped and leaned against the open door to keep himself upright -

"He'll suffer, and he'll relive it, and nothing we do will help, and then he'll die, unable to even recognize us, to tell reality from hallucination."

Sam felt his heart quicken against his will. To have it spelled out - well it didn't change anything. "Dean-" he rasped, dry-mouthed.

Crowley started for him again, grasped him at the shoulder and pulled him close. Reality blurred just the slightest, a head rush, and in the far far distance, he could hear Dean calling out his name and Crowley's name, and Sam's breath heaved in his ear, his blood rushed in his ear, and Crowley's voice, in his ear:

"I'm sorry, Moose. I'm with Squirrel on this one."

And then the hand was gone, and Sam was falling forward to brace himself on the car, catching his breath, and Dean was saying, "Guess you're stuck with me, bitch," and pushing him back into the passenger seat of the Impala.

How had he ever thought he'd have a choice in anything?

* * *

Sam woke with a start when Dean put the car into park, which was okay by Dean, because for the last three hours, he'd been a twitchy, gaspy mess in the passenger seat. More than once, Dean had checked his heart rate without him waking to find it rapid and loud, and his skin was clammy. Dean felt vaguely terrible for dragging him out in just his tee shirt and sweats.

"Gas," he said when Sam raised a brow at him in pissiness.

"Right. How long was I out?"

"If you call that 'out,' then about six hours." Dean switched the engine off and looked out at the pump rather than watch Sam rub drool from his face and pretend to be wide awake and lucid and _well_. "I packed you some clothes, if you want to change."

Sam twisted mid-yawn, arms in the air, to reach for his backpack in the back of the car. "Thanks," he said. "Want anything to eat or..."

"Road snacks? Thought you weren't on board with this-"

"Still gotta eat, Dean. Or are you planning to stop nagging me about that?"

"Nope, still nagging. Get me some Ho Hos." Dean pulled the credit card from his wallet to pay for gas and tossed the billfold to Sam. "And get yourself somethin' pretty."

"Ha ha." Sam caught it and promised to be back in a few minutes, and Dean watched him go, a gangly scrawny dude in shoes slipped onto his feet without socks, hair everywhere, tottering a little every few steps, and he thought _I want my goddamn brother back_.

But then Sam was inside getting the key for the men's room and buying Ho Hos and probably generic cardboard treats that hopefully didn't taste like rotting meat - because ew - and Dean turned to the pump to put gas in his baby.

He ran his hand down her rear fin, the gentle slope of it, and he missed her. For years she'd been his home, his and Sam's, and now that they had the bunker, she sat outside like a discarded thing. And while he loved his new bed, obviously, there was something about being on the road again with Sammy and their home on four wheels that the bunker couldn't replace.

Dean filled the tank and mulled over covered garage options for his baby while Sam did his crap, brushed his teeth, spent a million years in front of the mirror poking at his hopeless bed head, until that just wasn't going to play any more. Dean screwed the gas cap back on and reseated the nozzle at the pump, priming himself to drag his sorry brother out and back on the road, and if he was calling Crowley again, for the love of-

But when Dean opened the door to the mini mart, he was met with guns pointed at him, and shouts ringing out:

"FBI! Don't move!"


	2. Chapter 2

Episode 902  
"Hangman, Turn Your Head Awhile"  
Chapter Two

"FBI! Don't move!"

Dean put his hands up immediately and looked for -

- and growled at the sight of his little brother still in sweats and thin white tee shirt, face down on the ground, blood dripping down from a cut over his eye, arms up behind his back, pressure on that recently dislocated shoulder, under the weight of two red-faced officers of the small-town-donut variety. One of them had a busted nose.

"Sammy?"

"I'm fine," Sam called, but Dean listened for the strain. Just one iota of additional strain on Sam's delicate headparts was one iota too much. Shit.

Local police moved to arrest him.

"Hey, what's the charge?" Dean said, trying to resist just enough to stall, not enough to warrant the treatment Sam had gotten.

An agent sauntered up to them. "Credit card fraud." He grinned. "It's a felony, buddy."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Dean said, smiling cheerfully. "I'm sure this is all just a big misunderstanding." The was another little movement from the tangle of bodies on the ground where Sam was being held, a little grunt from Sam. "Hey, go a little easy, will ya? Sammy's... special."

Sam threw him an annoyed look, which Dean ignored. He sighed and allowed the local police to get his hands back behind him to cuff him. Ugh, _fine._ They'd just have to break out of the local lock-up, that's all.

"Impound the car, but leave the search and seizure to us, alright?" the agent said to the police officer who seemed like he might have been in charge if not for the suits. He patted the guy on the shoulder as he passed, and the officer gave him a look before turning back to Dean.

Dean shrugged. "Don't look at me. I'm not big on the Feds myself."

"Get him up," the officer said, and the cops holding Sam hauled him to his feet. To Sam's credit, he didn't so much as grumble in complaint, let alone curse vividly like Dean wanted to. But he was barefoot now, having lost his untied shoes in the scuffle, and his tee shirt had blood on it, and he was gasping for breath and pale. Goddammit.

"Why'd you have to fight?" Dean whispered as they were herded to the cop car.

"Reflex I guess," Sam replied listlessly.

"You okay?"

Sam didn't look at Dean. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine."

Dean narrowed his eyes at Sam's hollow uncertain, ADD gaze. "Yeah, you're fine. Sure."

* * *

Booking took the rest of the morning and into the afternoon. Dean was hungry. He assumed Sam was not, but that didn't mean he didn't need to eat _something_. Worse, they'd been separated, so Dean couldn't even hassle him about it. Dean sat in the back of his interview room while the FBI and the police let them "sweat," whatever good that would do them, and tapped on the radiator. A reply echoed back.

_Fine. No marathons. Desert. _A long pause, then: _Candy. _

Sam was fine, but he wasn't going to be able to make a run for it. He was thirsty enough to be considered a liability, and needed some painkillers stat.

Ordinarily when Sam admitted to "candy," it actually meant he at least needed stitches or something, but Dean thought in this case it probably just meant he needed some tylenol for the constant headache that had to have been made worse by the crack to the temple he'd earned. Dean tapped back:

_Roger. KYR. _

He hoped Sam actually did it this time. _Know your fucking rights, Sam._ Ask for water, ask for a damned tylenol. KYR was practically their family motto, although Sam was more likely to get picked up on suspicion of runaway or that one time CPS had tried to get involved. At eight, Sam could charm the whole police department into giving him a puppet show complete with pyrotechnics while he drank chocolate milkshakes, but once he'd hit thirteen or so, all bets were off. It was about a 50/50 chance they'd caught him in a really bad mood and then he'd clam up and refuse to say a word even to ask for water or a sandwich until Dean or Dad showed up to claim him, dehydrated and dangerously under-sugared. So, K-Y-fucking-R, okay Sam?

_Roger,_ Sam tapped back, and Dean thought he could sense annoyance running through the pipe. _No dice._

Dean frowned.

They were _refusing_ him water? That didn't sound right. But then his own door was opening up. Dean scrambled to his feet.

"Where's my brother?"

The agent smiled grimly, tapping the edge of a file folder against his palm. "He's fine."

"You can't hold us."

"Mr. Smith," the agent said. "I'm Agent Justice-"

"Wow," Dean said, dripping sarcasm. "You shoulda been a judge."

Agent Justice smiled again, a little knowing smile that made Dean's skin crawl. "Yes. Perhaps I should have been." He circled the room toward the table in the center of it and tapped the aluminum tabletop. "Have a seat, Mr. Smith."

Dean complied, if only because it heightened the chance he and Sam would be tossed into lock up together sooner rather than later. "Like I said, you can't hold us. We haven't done anything wrong."

Agent Justice watched him, said nothing. The hair on Dean's arms stood on end.

"You have to let my brother go, at least. He isn't well."

Agent Justice looked at Dean, lips pressed together into a contemplative line. "We know. He took a little turn-"

"You said he was fine."

"He's fine now."

"Goddammit," Dean said, standing so fast his chair spun out behind him. "You take me to him _now_."

Again, Agent Justice watched him, silent. Dean catalogued: unscuffed shoes, suit was new, hair was neatly trimmed, no watch, and the man was completely relaxed, as though he already knew how all of this was going to play out. As clues, they were almost useless - anyone could buy a new suit and get a haircut, and for some reason people were using their cell phones to get the time more than they wore watches these days, but the easy casual way Justice watched him-

"Well?"

Agent Justice smiled. "We're just finishing up some paperwork," he said. "Then I'm sure you'll be released within the hour."

Dean frowned. "What?"

"Unless you'd like to turn yourself in for some crime-?"

"No, door number one sounds good."

"Maybe in the meantime, you wouldn't mind answering some questions for me."

"Maybe I'll just keep my mouth shut, since you're not charging us with anything."

"We're not charging _you_ with anything." Justice shrugged. "We're still checking Sam out. Got some disturbing information from Northern Indiana State Hospital."

Dean frowned. "That's not - he's fine-"

"I'm sure he is. Most people just recover completely from..." He read from the file. "'The most severe and debilitating psychotic break I have ever seen,' so says Dr. Kadinsky. It says here you signed him out AMA, mere hours after he'd been taken in for ECT. That doesn't seem safe."

"He's fine."

"He put one of these fine local officers into the hospital," Justice said, smiling faintly.

Dean frowned; on the one hand, _that's my boy get 'em tiger_, but on the other, _Jesus Sam can we NOT with the assaulting a police officer already?_ "Oh please, for a broken nose?"

Justice narrowed his eyes at Dean in consideration.

Dean tried again: "He was defending himself-"

"You should take better care of your brother," Agent Justice said. Then a knock at the door and it was opening, and the agent from the gas station came in to scowl at Dean and mutter something.

"What," Dean demanded.

Agent Justice smiled serenely.

* * *

Dean didn't reply to his last message; Sam assumed he'd gotten walked in on and was undergoing "interrogation" or whatever passed for it here at police brutality central.

_Come on. That's not fair._

Sam closed his eyes and breathed through his nose, calming himself where he sat in the corner by the radiator. His hands were still cuffed behind his back, he was barefoot. His tee shirt was damp from perspiration, and he shivered in the air conditioning. And he was _so_ thirsty. But no one would come in farther than the doorway.

_I mean, from their point of view, _you_ provoked _them.

The real trick was going to be telling Dean the truth while still convincing him that everything was fine. Assuming they busted out. Assuming Dean could bust them out.

_You're a real big bruiser to everyone who doesn't know you. But then, no one knows you like I do, do they, Sammy?_

The walls dimmed. Dehydration, Sam thought. Tunnel vision from low blood sugar. The dull laze still sitting in his muscles from the sleeping pill Dean had slipped him.

Or was it Dean? Or was it anything at all? Or was that the shadow of something else just out of sight, there fringing his vision?

The walls vanished. The space narrowed down to a point, the table, hopelessly out of reach, because nothing worked did it, not when it was all in pieces and unconnected, not when you were making tiny homes out of your bones for the little mice to live in, the little clockwork mice you created because they pleased you when they moved about so freely, so lifelike, little roofs for them made of teeth, little windows made of skin stretched so tight it let light through, little rugs made of thin slices of your heart.

That was a little thing he gave you, that was a little treasure, that was a thing that could be crushed into dust and viscera.

But you have eternity to remake it. You have eternity to make it _perfect._

_We have eternity. Sam. Saa-aam._

"Stop-"

Sam willed himself present. That song was _not allowed._ He focused on the burn in his shoulder, he focused on the throb in his skull. He shifted his head and felt the bones in his neck slide against each other. Felt the cold grit concrete of the wall press into the soft swollen wound on his brow and he pressed and pressed, and ground that grit into his flesh there tear away at his flesh there-

-and the walls came back.

And the table was just an object in a room, taking up neither more or less space than a table ought to.

And he was just in a podunk police station in god knew where, and they wouldn't bring him water because _they were afraid of him_, and he was the thing with power here.

But the thing with power could only curl up in the corner and rub blood onto the wall and breathe slowly and wait for someone to come and fix his broken puppet legs and speak more loudly than the thing in his head.

Please Dean, speak so loudly, please.

_Sammy. _

No.

_Saaaam. Sam!_

"Sam, goddammit look at me. Jesus what did you do to him?"

Sam gasped and looked up into Dean's panicked face, Dean's hands on either of his shoulders, shaking him, and when Sam looked at him, Dean moved his hands to hover at the gash on his brow, looking horrified.

"What the hell did you bastards do?"

"I did it," Sam said, breathless. "I did it."

"Cuffs, now."

Motion around him, and his hands were free, and his shoulder burned but it wasn't broken, and Dean was shoving shoes onto his feet and hauling him up _fix those broken puppet legs_ and they were shoving through everyone to the outside.

_When are you going to tell him?_

Sam shook his head hard. Dean steadied him. Everything moved so slowly.

"Easy, here we go," Dean said, lowering him into the passenger seat. "Man, you weren't kidding with 'no marathon,' were ya?"

Sam breathed and focused and circled his shoulder a few times and by the time Dean was coming around to the driver's side of the car, Sam had worked out that they hadn't exactly escaped, and that they were in their car safe and sound, and that his shoes were on his feet. Oh, and he was lucid again, so there was that.

"What happened?"

Dean looked at him like he was - okay, that was fair.

"I mean. Why are we here and not sitting in county lock up waiting to be transferred?"

Dean shook his head and started the car up. "Crazy luck? They just let us go. Questioned me for about five minutes after making me wait for hours - you too, I guess."

"No one questioned me." Sam tapped at his bleeding head wound. "No one would come in past the doorway."

"Yeah, well," Dean said, pulling out of the impound lot, "you look like a bruiser to anyone who doesn't know you."

Sam looked at him, mouth agape. _No no no-_

"What? I'm not saying it's a bad thing. Jesus, sensitive much?"

Sam stared at the dash. _Please be Dean please be Dean-_

"We'll stop at the next hotel we see a minimum of three towns away from this shithole, get you patched up, changed. And Sammy?"

Sam blinked at him. "What."

"We're gonna have a nice little talk about what's goin' on in your head. Okay, I mean it. No hiding shit from me."

"I know."

"None of this 'I'm fine' bullshit."

"_Dean_, I know. Anyway, you lied about it first. You knew before I did. Hell, I even _guessed_ what was going on, and you flat out told me I was wrong. So. Hi, I'm Pot. Mr. Kettle, I presume."

"Good to see you're with it enough to make a break for the moral high-ground, Sam. Sounding more like yourself already."

Sam rolled his eyes. _Definitely Dean._

* * *

"So. I'm in."

Dean looked up from where he'd been flipping through the channels on the tv for porn while Sam showered. "Come again?"

Sam rolled his eyes in that _I'm going to regret this but..._ way that he had, and flipped the towel over his shoulder on his way toward his bed from the bathroom, dressed in fresh jeans. "I'm in."

"You wanna tell me what changed your mind?"

"No." Sam rifled through his backpack for a shirt. "But I'm going to anyway."

Dean frowned. Sam pulled a shirt on, took his time. It was clear he didn't want to talk about it, and Dean had been paying attention; all it took was the mere mention of the cage to send Sam there. And the way Sam's fingers shook as he buttoned his shirt, Dean was like _this_ close to saying _forget it, Sammy. It's fine. Don't say anything if you don't want to._

Then Sam sat on his bed and didn't say anything. Just stared at his hands hanging between his knees. He tapped at the butterfly-bandages over the cut on his temple, pressed on the bruising without appearing to think about it. Dean frowned, opened his mouth, but Sam-

"I can't describe it to you, Dean. You know, I thought I would be able to. That _this_, we could talk about. But. I can't. I can't put it into words. I tried to rehearse in the shower, but..." Sam looked up at him, shame in his face, and Dean understood that to mean _but I can't even talk about it to myself without falling apart, and isn't that just perfect, isn't that exactly what we need right now_, and Dean opened his mouth again to say something, whatever, something positive and mean to get him off the pity-party train.

But Sam shook his head and Dean hadn't figured out what to say before Sam continued: "But I'm in for this mission, or I'll die trying, because I'm a liability to you this way."

Dean frowned. Suddenly Dean had a vision of Sam going flight or fight on the cops who tried to arrest him, thinking they were any of a million different terrible things from the cage, and his little control freak brother wouldn't be able to (hadn't been able to) handle losing his shit on a job, especially if it put Dean into danger.

Dean rolled his eyes. "Well, as heroic motivations go, it's a little weak, but I'll take it."

"Well we've done 'revenge for dead parents,' _I've_ done 'revenge for dead brother.' You've done 'give life to bring dead brother back.' We're runnin' the well dry, dude."

Dean grinned. No, of course Sam hadn't mentioned _find girlfriend's killer, kill werewolf who turned new lover, work out the emotional crap of having to put said new lover down like a dog by killing sons of bitches, watch old flame die as part of a grand scheme even though she hadn't even seen Sam in years. _No, of course Sam hadn't mentioned them. But it was clear he was thinking about it. The pity-party train had lots and lots of cars with this guy.

"Maybe we'll just have to do a reboot," he said. "Start over. Work out some never-been-done-before origin story."

"Yeah, those exist." Sam gave him a little grin and threw his towel at Dean. "So where's all this research you want me to go through?"

Dean heaved on the strap of his own duffel and sorted through. "It's just the one binder from the library, the Complete something something of John Dee, or something."

"Oh, good, you know three words of the title."

"Shaddup." Dean frowned, pawing through his duffle again. "What the-" Then he dumped the whole thing out on his bed. "It's gone."

Sam shrugged. "Maybe it's in the car?"

"No, I left it right here." Dean growled. "Bastards."

"Oh. Of course. They weren't real FBI."

"They just rolled us for that priceless one of a kind fucking binder. That explains why they left our trunk full of illegal firearms alone."

Sam blew out a breath and fell backward onto his bed, arms splayed out to the sides. "Great. So not only did we get on the radar of fake FBI who apparently know us well enough to catch up with us nine hours from home, but some genius took the only copy of the material containing our _only lead_ out of the most protected place on earth and got it stolen."

Dean made a face. "A) I'm pretty sure they were real FBI, which doesn't make me feel better, and B) of _course_ I didn't take the only fucking copy. I had Kevin make scans and put them on your computer."

"Oh. Good. So let's just hope they didn't think of that and wipe my hard drive while they were at it."

"That means there's also a copy back home, smartass."

"Wow, it's like you knew they were comin'," Sam bitched, sarcasm oozing.

"No." Dean shoved his clothes and guns back into the duffel. "If I knew they were comin', I'da put that crap on a flash drive and made like a mule outta Mexico. This isn't a game, Sam. This is your life."

"I get it Dean, and I'm in!" Sam said, sitting up and waving him off. "You can stop with the disturbing visuals."

Dean grinned. "Just remember, Sammy. When your ass is on the line, _my_ ass is on the line. Literally."

"Gross-"

"Don't think I won't make you put on the rubber gloves-"

"Dude, gross!"

"Laptop!" Dean said, chucking it over to Sam's bed. "Check and see if they left it alone. It could be fine. You gotta password on there."

"Like the FBI can't crack my password."

"It has all those random letters and numbers in it-"

"Unlike yours."

"Who's gonna guess DDSlantyBabes?"

"Anyone who knows you? And also, 'slanty'? Really? That's so not okay-"

"Oh get off, man. You know I say it with love."

"Whatever." Sam started tapping at the keyboard. "I'm gonna be pissed if they wiped everything."

"You needed new porn anyway."

"I've been cataloguing what we have at the bunker so we can actually find stuff. And I've been transferring information from Dad's journal and writing up some of our own cases. You know. Bringing the family business into the 20th century."

"It's the 21st century."

"We're so not ready for the 21st century."

Dean tilted his head in acknowledgement. Probably right. Dad was still drawing pictures of stuff when photographs would have been so much more helpful when trying to pinpoint specific types of fugly.

"Damn." It was Sam's thoughtful voice, didn't signal a complete loss, but he wasn't happy about whatever he'd just found. "Everything's where it should be, except there's nothing in the folder called 'John Dee.' I assume that's where Kevin put it."

Dean shrugged. "I assume. So just like everything else, they took just those files and left all the other weird ass, potentially illegal crap alone."

Sam looked at him. "I don't like this."

"You and me both." Dean went to the mini fridge where he'd stashed a six pack while Sam was primping and pulled out a couple of bottles. "Well. We still have John Winthrop. We still have Boston."

"Yeah, but what are we looking for there?" Sam reached up to catch the bottle Dean tossed him. "Do you remember anything else? Clues about where this mystery journal might have been hidden?"

"If I found any clues, you think I'd have called up John Dee on his ghost phone?"

"What about Charlie? She could maybe help recover the files?"

"Like the FBI couldn't do a thorough job of deleting them?" Dean scoffed.

"If they know _us_, they know that's beyond our assorted skillsets, _and_ they had limited time to do it. Let's hope it was a rush job. Cell phone."

Dean found it in the pocket of the sweatshirt tossed over the chair at the desk and lobbed it into Sam's waiting hands. "I'll call Kevin, see if he can't work some prophet magic on the files back home and feed us anything."

"Good call. Hey, Charlie."

Dean watched Sam smile easy as Charlie launched into her jabbering mile-a-minute thing. He imagined she reminded Sam of his college days, someone with more similar interests in the smarty-pants arena. Girls and beating people with sticks and porn and scifi movies, that was all Dean, but Sam read the same dumb books full of hope and whimsy and Sam had had the same kind of idealistic aura about him, once. Sam tapped at his keyboard at her instructions, _yeah yeah, did that, it says..._ And then _oh, no, not really, just one like 100-level like freshman year. Oh, thanks, I mean, it makes logical sense..._

Dean turned away and dialed his own phone.

"Kev, yeah, listen-""

"_Are you almost done?"_

"What? No. How far away do you think Boston is?"

"_You're driving?"_

"Got a problem with that? Listen, I need you to take a look at the stuff I asked you to scan-"

* * *

Sam smiled up at Dean sparring with Kevin over the phone.

"_Sam?"_

Sam looked back down at the laptop screen. "Nothing. Think it's hopeless?"

"_I think you're overdue for a visit from your pocket techie. Gimme a couple of days and I'll swing by?"_

"We kinda need it now. And we're kinda not home."

"_On the road again? Not headed toward California, are you?"_

"Other way, sorry. But you know, give us a..." He looked up at Dean to try to gauge how long this directionless, false-hope mission might take. "Maybe a week? And we'll have a cookout and beers and stuff."

"_Only if I get to braid your hair."_

Sam smiled fondly, hit with a sudden soul-deep grief. If this didn't work, he wasn't even likely to be able to recognize her in a week. "Deal. But. Better make it more like two or three weeks. In fact, call first. This might take a while."

"_Sure thing, Sassafrass."_

"Sassa-?" But she'd hung up, and he sat staring at his phone. She was so bubbly and eager all the time, even when she'd been scared out of her mind breaking into Roman Enterprises, she was this carbonated kind of scared, this giddy energy that fueled her. The passions she poured that energy into, the full throttle. She reminded him of Dean, but she was also just this completely different person, and it was nice to see that there was this whole life somewhere in a world where he didn't exist.

It made it easier.

And in three weeks or so, if he was gone, Dean was going to need her.

_Probably should have told him the truth, the whole truth._

Yeah. Probably should have.

Sam looked up as Dean hung up on Kevin. Behind him, Lucifer waggled his fingers in hello, and Dean turned to him with black eyes, and under the door snuffled hell hounds, and in the corner was a city made of dust and broken bones with tattered sinew flags.

Really? Hell hounds? Demon-Dean? You're off your game.

_Eventually, you're going to convince yourself that you've got it under control. That you can live like this. And then-_

No. I know I don't live through this.

"Charlie couldn't help over the phone, but I _did_ volunteer you for grill duty in a few weeks when she can swing by."

Dean grinned blood teeth and said, "Awesome. We'll have to get some steaks."

* * *

They stayed the night in that dingy motel, left the next morning bright and early - Sam's dumb idea. Dean woke up with coffee in his face and Sam already dressed and packed, and Dean was packed too, and Sam was too perky, and-

It was like they were just hunting again, on a case, ready to bodily tackle zombies and vampires and rugarus and whatever else. Ready to dig up graves and light shit on fire and bask in the smoke. And they didn't talk about Lucifer or lies or how soon Sam was gonna die and they bickered over the best route, and-

So when Sam fell asleep just after their vending machine lunch, Dean grumbled at the road. Nudged Sam when it was time to pee, time to get gas. Scoped out the insides of gas stations for signs of another cop show. More than once, he'd gotten just enough gas into the car to make the halfway mark before getting cold feet and zooming off. Maybe Sam's less-beaten path would have been a better idea afterall, but there was no way Dean was going to tell him that.

It took more like seventeen hours all told to pull into the cheap motel a few miles out of Boston and drag his sorry brother out of the car.

"Come on. You got sleep. You have to take over now."

Sam wrestled himself upright and stretched his arms up, yawning big. "Yeah okay, sure," he mumbled. Then he rubbed his eyes and looked around and said, "Where are we?"

"Boston, you ape."

Sam checked his watch. "Okay, well. It's one in the morning. If I'm the boss, I say we hit the hay."

"What?"

"It's not my fault you drove all day and night. It's too late to do anything now."

Dean slammed Sam's door shut and went round to the trunk for his stuff. "There's plenty we can do tonight. Dig up a grave, for one." He tossed Sam a shovel.

Sam tossed it back. "John Winthrop was buried in a mausoleum."

"How do you know that?"

"You literally just oiujaed John Dee and threw me into a car, didn't you."

"What? I found out he was buried in Boston, didn't I?"

"How?"

"... I asked John Dee."

Sam chuckled. "Dean. I'm telling you. Google is your friend." Sam reached into the back seat to grab his duffel and backpack. "Let's at least get our room and make a plan, okay?"

"Fine."

"Fine."

Thirty minutes later, Sam sat sullen in the passenger seat while Dean smirked, enjoying the bitchfest.

"Come on, dude. You slept like half the afternoon away. There's no way you're more beat than I am." He smacked Sam in the shoulder and laughed at the road. "Isn't this like old times? You, me, defiling the sacred final resting places of dead dudes."

Sam pressed his lips together. "Yeah."

"Oh come on. Cheer up! Jesus Sam. It's not a funeral."

Sam drew his brows together and he didn't look at Dean in that very obvious not-looking-at-you way he had which meant - _Jesus Sam. It's not _your _funeral, okay?_ "Don't. Just don't. You wanna be depressed about saving your life, fine. But I refuse to be gloomy gus about it. We're saving you, and that's a good thing, and screw you."

Sam just nodded at the dash like he hadn't expected a different response. Well of course he hadn't. "Just up here," he said, watching the GPS on his phone.

"Look alive, Sammy," Dean said then, pulling over just south of the historic "King's Chapel Burial Ground" where Winthrop was entombed. Then he actually looked at it and cursed. "What the shit?"

Sam looked up from his phone and blew out a breath. "Great."

Cops. Just. _Everywhere_. Crawling all over the cemetery like it was paved in glazed pastries. Rubies and sapphires colored everything in turns.

What. The. Actual. Fuck.

Sam turned to him, innocent brows up. "_Now_ can we make a plan?"


	3. Chapter 3

Thank you to everyone who has reviewed or put this and other Lustra stories on alert. I hope you continue to enjoy this series! There are a couple of blatant mentions of Boogeyman canon, so I get another chance to encourage you all to search Caladrius in that little search box up there and read The Boogeyman, a nice little innocent season 1/2/weechesters fic that I promise won't make your heart hurt or your soul clench in feels-splosions.

Cheers!  
Age

* * *

**Episode 902**  
**"Hangman, Turn Your Head Awhile"**  
**Chapter Three**

"Okay, Kevin's email has a bunch of passages he _thinks_ might be useful. But I need to sit and figure out how to translate them."

Dean groaned and threw his head back where he sat at the little table in their motel room. "I thought this guy was like from England or something, where I _foolishly_ assumed they spoke, like, _english_."

Sam stared at the computer a moment more, tapping at the keyboard, and said, "It's in some kind of code, and-" He looked up. "Weren't you just complaining about how you drove all day and I'm the one who got sleep? Go to bed. This'll be done by the time you're rolling over asking for another five minutes in the morning."

Dean eyeballed him. Sam shifted under his gaze.

"Yeah. No. You're awake, I'm awake."

Sam made a face. In the general soup of Dean's mistrust, he'd lost the thread of just what had cost him his freedom of movement this time. Like what, he was going to run off back to the bunker when he'd already said he was in for the plan? Like he was going to wander into the nearest police station and get himself arrested? Like he was going to-

_Go off the deep end and -_

Damn.

Sam blew out a breath. "Ten points for the show of solidarity, man, but you don't have to do that. Dean, I'm good. I'm awake. I'm even..." He shrugged. "I feel fine."

_For now._

"Yeah?" Dean said.

"Yeah. I swear."

"Well thanks for the reassurance, but while you're cracking the Da Vinci code, someone's gotta come up with the plan to get past the five-oh in that cemetery."

Sam raised his brows. Oh. Didn't he feel stupid, assuming Dean was _worried_ about him.

_What did you expect, when he doesn't know the whole story? When you've lied to him again?_

"Right." Sam looked back at his laptop and pressed his lips together. "Well," he said tonelessly. "We can come up with a plan together tomorrow. We can't do anything until dark anyway."

Dean frowned; Sam could see his entire attitude change out of the corner of his eye, just from how his body shifted. "Yeah," Dean agreed. "I guess... I'll just hit the hay then." He got up from the chair at the table and gestured dramatically at it. "Your table's ready, Mishoor."

"Monsieur?

"That's what I said."

Sam rolled his eyes and gathered up his laptop and notebook to move from bed to table. "In that case, I'll have a beer and the house special."

Dean flopped onto his bed and picked up the tv remote, chuckling. "Sorry, I'm just the mater-dee. A waitress will be with you shortly."

"The service in this dive is terrible."

* * *

Dean was snoring twenty minutes later, out cold. He'd driven hard, that was true, and while Sam felt bone-tired himself, he wasn't eager to sleep. Lucifer got at him even in dreams, and while he'd managed to dose himself well enough to drift off in the car without, apparently, telegraphing his nightmares to the waking world, he needed to reserve his stash for times Dean was awake and vigilant.

And he needed to translate this gibberish Kevin had sent him.

And he needed more help than just this email. He put his phone to his ear and when the ringing stopped, he whispered, "Hey, Kevin, listen-"

"_Why are you whispering? Are you kidnapped? What's happening?_"

"Kidnapped- Kevin, Kevin, calm down. Everything's fine. Dean's asleep, that's all. I'm working on the stuff you sent over. I need to bounce some ideas off you."

"_It's two in the morning, man._"

"I know, I'm sorry. If it makes you feel better, it's three here, so... Listen."

* * *

_A shout, a cry, dirt and blood, smoke from the small fire, the only thing keeping any warmth in his body, a beacon for the scavenging hordes, but what did that matter when his soul drew them in if he dared to rest anywhere longer than an hour. A shout, a cry, dirt blood and "brother." And the loud clap of thunder-_

"Crap, I gotta go. Yeah, thanks, Kevin. Get some sleep. Tonight, probably. Yeah, you too."

Dean kept his eyes closed for another long moment. Yes, he was spying. Yes, it was bad, he was a bad big brother, whatever, suck it, because Sam wasn't okay, and _Sam was never okay_, so he was allowed to worry basically whenever he wanted.

And spying paid off, because Sam hung up with Kevin and after a span of silence, padded across the room, a thump of something onto his bed, the zip of his backpack or duffel, rummaging, and then a lid was being screwed off of something and Dean opened his eyes a slit to see Sam with his back to him, arm up as he downed a shot of something, and-

Damn. Damn. Sam's back was turned, but Dean could just fucking _guess_-

It wasn't a stretch of the imagination then to get how Sam had been so perky and rarin' to go the previous morning. God double damn it.

But then Sam was stowing the bottle in his backpack and stretching his shoulders and circling the injured one through its diminished range of motion and hissing through his teeth and Dean decided confronting Sam about crap could wait until at least _something _worked right on him again. Five years ago, it'd been a different story, but Dean wasn't sure he could look this thinner, worn out, broken version of his brother in the face and tell him to stop doing something that probably made him feel like he wasn't dying 24/7.

And how was he surprised by it anyway? Dean had thought of it almost immediately after Cas' bombshell, that maybe _demon blood_ was a good idea. Of course, Dean had dismissed it as a frantic fit of hysterics, but Sam might have actually thought it was a viable option, considering his uh... gloomy state. Whatever. Whatever. If Death could fix him, he wouldn't need it anymore and the problem would take care of itself.

Dean made a show of yawning and smacking his lips like he'd just waked up, and Sam spun around - guilty conscience, bro? - and almost tripped over himself getting to Dean's bedside, concern in his face.

"Dean. You okay?"

Dean raised his brows and sat up. "Uh. Did I wake up in a universe where _I'm_ the one barely upright and you're the one hand-crafting delicious burgers?"

Sam looked hurt but apparently shrugged it off. He didn't move away. His stupid eyebrows were all twisted up and he was looking over Dean's face like he might find evidence that Dean was traumatized or about to sob openly or something. Creepy.

"You had a nightmare I think."

Oh. "I say something?"

"Campfire. I was gonna wake you up but... you settled down. We don't have to talk about it," he added hastily. "Whatever. As long as you're okay."

"Yeah, no. I'm good. So what was that?" Dean said, eager to change the subject. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. "Kevin get something for us?"

"Kevin-" Sam started, a question in his face.

Oh right, he hadn't been "awake" for that. "I thought I heard you on the phone. Maybe I dreamed it."

"No, I called him." Sam went back to the table and flipped through his notebook. "It's an ancient cipher style-"

"Renaissance era is hardly 'ancient,'" Dean jibed, scrubbing his hands through his hair and over his face.

"Ha ha. Luckily, Kevin and I were able to crack it. I mean, back then it'd have been impossible to do, but we've come so far in cryptography-"

"The chase, if you don't mind cutting."

"Right. Point being, we got some stuff translated. I still need to apply it to the rest of this material, but that's just pencil work now."

"Right now."

Sam shrugged. "I slept in the car. I'm good."

Dean eyed the jacket and jeans. "Going somewhere?"

"I left you a note. The university library is open 24 hours. I thought I'd do some digging to see if the old abandoned tunnels are blocked up or what."

"The old abandoned tunnels? Bit cliche, isn't it?"

"Boston is old, Dean. Of _course_ there are old abandoned tunnels. Anyway, I did a search in their catalog and they've got some stuff on Dee-"

Dean shook his head. "Sam, it's-" He yawned and wrestled his wrist to check the time. "Five am, Jesus, how the hell-"

"Not a good feeling, is it?"

"What?"

"Not knowing how much time has passed while you've been sleeping."

Dean rolled his eyes.

"Anyway, it's six am here." Sam turned back to the notebook and picked up a pencil.

"Fine, it's _six am_-"

"I thought we were in a hurry, Dean. I thought you wanted to get this done asap. I didn't even want to do this, and now that I'm all Go Team and helping, you're what, reluctant?"

"Okay, settle down busy bee. Jesus. You are like, five hundred times more hyper than you should be."

Sam shrugged. "I slept in the-"

"Car. Yes. I was there." Dean ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. "What happened to 'the trials are kicking my ass I can't even make my own sandwiches'?"

Sam frowned at him with that face of his. "I never said that."

"It was heavily implied, what with the falling over and passing out. So?"

"So? Here." Sam got up from the table and went to his bed, reached beyond his backpack, threw a paper bag at Dean. "It's no delicious burger, but it's the best I could do. Enjoy."

Dean stared at the bag for a moment, the purple and blue "Donut Stop" logo, then the realization hit him: six am, Sam wide awake and clothed, dropped the backpack on his bed, _I left you a note_ - Sam wasn't heading out, he was coming back in.

"You _left? _What were you thinking?"

Sam rolled his eyes. "That I have your number in my emergency contacts if someone needed to call you and that if I was still gone when you woke up, you'd hunt me down using the handy _piece of paper_ I left you saying exactly where I'd be _and_ where the nearest hospital is, just in case." Sam slipped said note from the nightstand between their beds and balled it up to throw it at Dean's head in evidence. "I'm not stupid, Dean. I know I'm not okay. I'm trying to deal."

"Sam-" Dean pressed his lips together.

"Dean." Sam shrugged. He did a lot of that. "I feel okay right now. And _while_ I feel okay, I want to do something useful. I thought you'd be on board-" he said, his voice turning toward the accusatory.

"I'm on board for you using these moments to focus on feeling better, Sam. The last thing you need to be doing is staying up all night running yourself ragged just because you have a burst of energy."

"No, that's exactly what I need to be doing, Dean. You don't get it. There is no _focus on getting better_ for me. For all I know, this is the last time I get to feel _good_, Dean. I'm not going to waste it sleeping." He turned away and slumped back at the table. "You want me in, I'm in. But you have to get that that means I _work_."

Dean sighed and reached down for his own duffel. "Fine. I'm gonna take a shower. Then we'll talk about work." He turned at the bathroom door. "Don't _go_ anywhere."

* * *

"You're sure these tunnels connect up to the crypt," Dean said.

"Yeah. Well-" Sam paused, shined his flashlight down at a map, turned it around. "Yeah, pretty sure."

"Great." Dean sneezed. "Always the sewers with us, you ever notice that?"

"This isn't a sewer. It's either an old underground passage for workers from the outskirts to the city center, back when it was harder to deal with the harsh winters, or it's an underground railroad passage routing runaway slaves toward Canada, or it's-"

"Rum-runners? Sweet. I bet we can find their old stash down here."

Sam chuckled. "Yeah, you just keep your eyes peeled for that. Here, this way." The beam of light swung toward the left, where Dean saw the infinite void of black yawn just before the light hit stone on either side. Sam struck out in that direction, kicking aside loose stones and swinging the light around them. "I asked Kevin to dig up whatever he could on John Winthrop, since the library only had the commonly known stuff. The Men of Letters had a decent file on him, although it looks like they didn't know why he might have been important. Like different members through the years had picked up on something strange about him in the course of researching other cases and collected it all into this big envelope."

"Someone was good at hiding his tracks," Dean said.

"Better than most, yeah. But there was this scrawled little notation in the margin of one of the pages. 'Escape route' with three question marks, right next to a paragraph about where he was buried."

"Enter Winchesters."

"Bingo."

"Should I ask why he thought he needed an escape route from his own tomb?"

Sam squinched up his face, dodged a cobweb. "Paranoid? Maybe rightly so? They weren't always really good at checking whether someone was dead before burying them back then. You know the stories about the bells."

"Yeesh."

"Here we go," Sam whispered, pulling up to a stop in the tunnel where it looked like a portion of the sidewall had been bricked up. He flashed his light down at the map again and then ahead of them down the tunnel. "I think this is it."

"What's that?" Dean shined his own light onto the brick. "Right there." The symbol was like a little stick figure dude with horns and little bendy legs, stamped into the red brick.

Sam peered at it, that peculiar expression on his face that meant he was putting two and two together, pinched and thoughtful. "It's the monad," he murmured. "John Winthrop's signature. It's the only thing that ties him to John Dee."

"Well, I do love me some confirmation." Dean dropped the duffel and untangled the sledgehammer and crowbar. "Which do you want?"

Sam reached for the sledgehammer. Predictable. Dean pulled it back. "Trick question. You're injured."

"I'm fine."

"Yeah. Okay. And when you're whining about your poor little shoulder later, who has to listen to you? You get the crowbar." He yanked it backward again and Sam lurched for it, and Dean grinned at the way Sam tried to suppress the little twinge of pain. "Like I said. Crowbar."

Sam took it, but the hissy fit wasn't over. "Dean, I broke my _arm_ and you made me carry the shovel back to the car."

"Yeah, but you were young and resilient then. You don't bounce anymore, Sammy. You're like thirty."

"Still younger than..." Sam trailed off, dropped the crowbar with a loud bang.

"Sam?" Shit. Sam was staring, looking off like he was paying attention to something behind him. There was nothing there, which meant - "Sam? Come back, Sammy."

"I'm here. I'm here."

"What was it? Tell me."

"Nothing. Nothing. I got it, I'm fine." Dean watched as Sam, with some effort, dragged his gaze forward, to stare at the wall. Then he looked at Dean, careful breaths that filled his whole chest, mouth open, brows up, grounding himself, that open face full of trust he aimed at Dean. "I'm okay. I'm okay."

"What'd I say? What was it?"

Sam squeezed his eyes shut. "Stupid, nothing. Just, how old I am-"

"Thirty, you're thirty. Right here, real time."

Sam shook his head. He looked at Dean, calculating, figuring, wondering whether to come clean with whatever horrible thing Lucifer had just put into his head, Dean thought.

"Sam? You can't do this alone, man. Talk to me."

There was a moment it seemed like Sam was going to ignore it, move on, pick up the crowbar and just pretend nothing had happened, but he took a breath and tilted his head and smiled just a little, a little hopeful thing like, Dean didn't know what, and said:

"I'm two-hundred and ten." He shrugged a shoulder like. "See? Stupid."

"Jesus."

Sam bent to retrieve the crowbar and as he fitted it into a crack in the brick, he said, "Remember how you used to tease me on my birthday, like every year until I turned six?" He heaved on the end of the iron bar.

"No?"

He threw his weight into the work, grunting with the effort, and said, "I thought I'd eventually catch up to you, and you teased me mercilessly and told me you'd always be older, no matter what. I could never get older than you." Sam stopped and smiled, but Dean saw it was brittle. That he was trying, _so hard_. "Never tell Sam Winchester he can't do something. I got this, Dean. Don't look at me like that. I can deal with this."

_No you can't, Sam._ And Sam gave him this look before he lowered his eyes, like he knew it too. Like they didn't know each others' bravado by heart, like Sam needed to fucking _protect_ him from this.

Oh, crap. _Crap._ Sam wasn't on board with the plan. Sam was just going along for Dean's sake. Sam didn't care if he got fixed, Sam didn't care if they never found Enoch, but he was going to try, _for Dean_. Oh goddammit.

Well, whatever. Sam didn't do anything half-assed, even if he didn't care about succeeding. Dean would just have to convince him that it was worth saving his life after his life was good and saved, that's all.

* * *

It was twenty minutes of work to clear out the porous brick. It crumbled easily once Sam had gotten the first brick loose. Dean had stared at him until the sound of the brick hitting ground dragged him back, and Sam ignored that in favor of just throwing himself into the work. The burn in his shoulder, the exhaustion of trials and lack of sleep and the brink of starvation - all fuel, and with Dean's sledgehammering, they were through about a foot of wall and busting through into John Winthrop's crypt.

Sam shined his flashlight around, coughing. His light flashed through the dust and cobwebs and bounced from the ponderous black monument in the center of the crypt, a blocky spire up on four legs. Sam put the back of his hand to his mouth, coughed again. Dean's hand on his back, steadying him, but Sam shrugged it off, waving at him _I'm okay_. "Just the - dust." He bent over to cough some more. Okay, not _just_ dust. But Dean took the hint and started strolling around, looking in and around and under things.

"What are we looking for, again?"

"A journal," Sam said. He cleared his throat and took a couple of breaths, and then he narrowed his eyes. Bent over nearly double, he could see under the monument in the center of the crypt, in the floor-

-John Dee's symbol, the monad, the only thing that connected him to John Winthrop, cast in brass, fixed to the stone dead in the center of the stone under the monument.

"Dean, look."

Sam dropped to his knees and hunched low; Dean's flashlight beam swiveled over. Then he was kneeling on the other side of the monument and he met Sam's eye with this devil bright grin like he'd just discovered treasure.

"Dude. This has to be it, right?"

Sam shrugged. "Maybe. In the floor? In the monument itself somewhere?"

Dean pivoted his flashlight upward to illuminate the monument. "In there? How?"

Sam shook his head. "I don't know." On a hunch, he scooted forward to wedge his fingertips into the cracks between stones in the floor, grunted a little in an effort to pry the one with the monad fixed to it up, just in case it was buried. He slumped and frowned at it.

"Oh well. Good try," Dean said, sounding very much like it wasn't a good try at all, but _go ahead Sam, you try to puzzle this thing out, I'm going to do the real work, again._ He got up and started poking around the shelves that lined the walls of the crypt, books and collections, some doors that must have led to the bodies of John Winthrop and his family.

Sam pressed his lips together. Yeah. Maybe it wasn't in the floor. Who knew if John Winthrop even knew what he'd had? Who knew the journal was even _here_?

Oh right, Dean's ghost told them.

Sam sat back and shined his light up onto the blocky monument again.

And frowned.

"Crap."

"What." Dean's light jerked toward him.

"It's here."

Dean frowned and came around to where Sam sat on the floor, shining his own light where Sam's was pointed. Sam watched it dawn on him.

"Son of a bitch," he muttered. "Okay, I got paper and a pencil. We'll uh, we'll make rubbings-"

"Twentieth century, remember, Dean?" Sam hauled himself to his feet, tottering just a little, and pulled his phone from his pocket. "Pictures worth a thousand words."

He turned on the flash and proceeded to take fifty-seven photos of the blocky monument, which had hundreds of lines of text in some strange language scrawled all over it.

Hooray.

"Finally," Dean said when he was done. "Rubbings would have taken less time, Ansel."

"If they aren't legible, then this was for nothing, Dean."

"Yeah, yeah, just tell me we can blow this joint."

"Yeah, totally, in a minute," Sam said, distracted. He scrolled through some of the photos to check the quality, but. He shook his head. "I can't translate this. Our cipher won't work. This is different. There's gotta be a key somewhere."

There was a sound from outside. A shout. Sam and Dean froze. Steps outside, but then - nothing.

Sam frowned at the puzzle, flashed his light over the shelves. Behind him, Dean sucked in a breath. "Dude, you were right." He paused. "Ish."

Sam circled around the monument to find lying Dean on the floor where he'd been, not trying to pry up the stone, but instead running his fingers over the brass symbol. "It's loose," he explained. "And under here, there's like, a place it can fit into. Dude, it's clearly meant to be hidden." Dean pulled on the symbol and it came loose like he was unplugging the coffeemaker or something. He twisted around in order to fit it into whatever opening he'd found, and the whole monument lit up like a starry sky, constellations of text lines markedly different from the ones engraved into the stone monument..

Sam frowned. "I can read this." He nodded again. "Dean, I can read this. Leave it there, let me-" He wrestled his phone around to get another photo, but when he checked the quality- "It doesn't show up." Crap. "It doesn't show up on film, whatever manifestation this is. It just looks like all the other pictures."

"You gotta be kiddin me," Dean said, his voice muffled. He yanked the thing out of the bottom of the monument and scooted out from under it. "What good is this gonna do?" He pulled himself to standing, using the monument for support, and Sam -

"Whoa whoa, stop right there, Dean -"

Where Dean froze in place, with his hand holding the symbol so close to the stone of the monument, the etchings in the face of it glowed.

"Let me see that," Sam said, and Dean handed it over, comical befuddlement all over him. Sam brought the brass monad closer and closer to his phone screen, and he had to get _really_ close, but - "Yes!" he laughed. "Oh wow. This is amazing. I mean, the plug in you found for it must connect to the whole monument at once, but proximity - I mean, I should be able to read this whole thing now, maybe. I'll have to print it out, I mean, obviously, but-"

"Okay, slow down, Doctor Jackson." Dean headed toward the hole in the wall, squeezing Sam's shoulder as he passed. "You are so adorable when you geek out. Jesus."

"Shut up."

And then another sound. From the front of the mausoleum. And a shout. And another, and the door was being crashed into, and Dean bustled their crowbar and sledgehammer into the bag and pulled out the shotgun.

"Into the hole, Sammy," he said, turning to cover Sam's exit.

Sam went, but once in the tunnel, he said, "Dean, those are people."

"I know. I'll be careful."

The door crashed in, and there were suddenly dozens of flashlight beams aiming toward the monument, searching around from within the entryway, and the dust kicked up in earnest and oh, the shouting, the flashing light, the dust, the vague sense of vertigo, and Dean's hand on your shoulder pushing you, and his mouth frozen in _Go, goddammit_ and you go, there's something fiery in your veins and you go, there's a panic in your veins and you go.

And time speeds back up and you turn and punch the officer on your tail full in the face, not so hard that you break his nose, but it puts him on the ground, and-

Sam fought it back, the closing dark, and it was easy with Dean there, this cheering, whooping, brother who for a brief moment forgot that Sam was a monster, that he was unforgivable, that he was a liar and so weak-willed, forgot that he was _Sam_, and just laughed as they ran from the cops.

But Dean took a left and Sam took a right, and Dean yelled to draw them off Sam, and Sam hadn't asked for that, but Dean did it anyway. That was what Dean _did_.

So he was alone when it came, the crushing void of knowledge _this can't be real_. And there was nothing to fight, so he fought himself, because there was always a way out, but he had to find it.

Or sometimes, just. Stop.

* * *

Dean skidded to a stop around the corner. The footsteps of the couple of police who'd followed them into the tunnels went right on past him. Okay, great. Now... he was lost, but not being chased. All he had to do was get back to Sammy.

Okay, a left. A left. A right. Past the other hole in the wall that led into someone _else's_ crypt, an adventure for another time, for sure. Right, right, straight and - Yes. Off to his right, a pile of bricks and one portly member of Boston's finest still out cold thanks to Sam's right hook. Which meant Sam was hopefully hiding out down the right-hand tunnel just ahead to the left. Or better yet, totally out of the tunnel and waiting for him at the Impala. He trotted ahead to give the right hand path a cursory search-

And oh, wow, yeah, Sam hadn't gotten far, and Dean wanted to be grateful for that, but not this, not because of this.

Sam sat on the ground, back against the wall, _talking_.

His voice was real quiet, but he wasn't trying not to be heard, he wasn't whispering, just. Whoever he was talking to, they had to be real close to him.

"Sammy?" Dean said, sinking to his knees.

Sam sighed heavily. "Yeah, he's great. But it doesn't matter." He waved at the walls. "I'm not moving from this spot."

"Sam." Dean put his hand on Sam's shoulder. _Jesus_. Sam tensed, but relaxed a moment later, releasing a breath like Dean's touch had to be suffered through.

Sam shook his head. "Kill me, Dean. I know you want to."

Dean frowned. What the- But then Sam looked up, at nothing, at - _Lucifer, awesome._ Sam tilted his head and made a face. "Oh, I'm sorry, did I go off-script?"

Dean grinned up half his mouth. Even cracked crazy, this kid, Jesus. Sass-mouthing the friggin' _devil_. "_Sam_," Dean tried again, giving him a little shake.

Dean liked to think that Sam had gone soft in his year off, a little slower, a little less able to kill, while Dean's own instincts had been carved into him like a permanent fixture by his time in Purg. But he wasn't prepared, and he hadn't given Sam enough credit, and in the space of a breath, Sam was on his feet, dragging Dean up with him until Dean's toes were scraping the ground and his back was against the brick, and Sam's knife was at his throat.

Sam smiled, a pained, hopeless thing.

"Sammy stop, it's me. Sam, jeez-!"

Sam closed his eyes and breathed through his nose. The blade trembled at Dean's throat. Dean stayed very still. Do not spook. Remain chill. Crazy pot has been stirred, allow to settle. Above all else, do not risk injury to Sam and his fragile little noggin, or his fragile little constitution. Do not finish what Lucifer and those damn trials started.

But then Sam opened his eyes, devoid of hope they were, the dullest Dean had ever seen them, counting that time when he was ten and catatonic after a bad hunt, counting the time he pulled a five day silent treatment because Dad had moved them right before graduation. Sam was fire and fight and bright eyes that burned you, not these dull lifeless things.

And Sam said: "Dean would have had me on the ground by now." And a little smile like he knew all along, Dean wasn't real.

"Goddammit Sam," Dean snarled. "I'm _real_, and you're cutting the shit out of my neck, and I'd _have_ you on the ground by now if I wasn't worried about smashing your delicate little fucking broken brain all over the rocks. Snap the fuck _out of it_!"

Sam frowned. Blinked. Breathed. Shook his head, again again, whatever he was hearing, he didn't agree, didn't want to. Tears glassed his eyes, he didn't seem to notice, didn't swipe them away, they were normal, common, Dean's heart god fuck - Sam shook, a full body tensing of muscle, and he gritted his teeth and drew the knife back and the flash as it came down, but Dean-

Closed his eyes.

And when he opened them again, he was fully on his feet, and Sam had backed away against the far wall, holding his own bleeding arm to himself, digging his fingers into the gash, curled over it and breathing through gritted teeth and-

Shit.

The trip back to the motel was tense. Sam huddled against the passenger door, holding his arm to himself and sulking.

Dean couldn't think of anything to say.

Twenty minutes later, Sam was poking at the laptop while Dean stitched up his arm.

"Pretty deep, there, Sam."

"I guess."

"You wanna talk about this?"

"No."

"Let me rephrase. We're gonna talk about this." Sam pulled his arm away as Dean was tying off the last stitch. "Hey hey, my handiwork."

"There's nothing to talk about, Dean. You know what happened. I told you I was a - a liability. I could have killed you, man."

"Yeah but you didn't."

"No thanks to you."

"What was I supposed to do, Sam? Go a round with the guy who can't even stand up straight most of the time?"

"You just closed your eyes, Dean. You just... gave up."

Dean rolled his eyes. "I didn't give up, dude." Sam scootched his rolly chair a little further away and poked at the laptop some more. "I didn't give up," Dean said again, yanking the chair back where it had been. "Sammy look at me."

Sam did. He looked beat, circles around his eyes, pale, thin.

"I knew you wouldn't do it. I knew it. I know you."

It took a minute, a long goddammed minute, but Sam smiled. A little one, but a victory anyway. And Dean smiled too, and he thought _wow we're both lying sacks aren't we?_ And he thought _this kid had no doubt in his mind that I was a figment_. And he thought, well crap-

"All right. Translatin' time. Maybe I'll go out and get some dinner for us while you get to work?"

Sam looked at him. "Why don't we order in?"

Dean frowned and fingered his cell phone. "Sure, okay."

_No doubt at all. _He had a call to make.


	4. Chapter 4

**Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to review. I hope you continue to enjoy this series as much as I enjoy plotting and writing it. Quick note to remember: this isn't the end of the story, merely the end of this episode. Please put me on alert to get notes about future episodes! Thanks again!**

**-Age**

* * *

**Episode 902  
"Hangman, Turn Your Head Awhile"  
Chapter Four**

_Hi yes, Agent Donovan. I'm calling for the name of the officer who was hospitalized bringing in - yes, just yesterday. Just dotting some t's, crossing some i's - Great. Thank you._

_Hello there, how are ya. Listen, I'm trying to get a status on an officer who was - that's right. Agent Donovan, of - yes. Well, we're efficient. Sure, I'll hold._

_Yes hi hello, I'm looking into the status of the officer - that's right. Just filling in some paperwork - thanks. Really? And what does that mean? Uh huh. And how long do you expect - Oh. Well, I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, I know, a real hero. Uh huh. Thanks. _

Dean hung up with a curse. Through the window of their first floor motel room, he could see Sam scrolling down the printed out photos with the weirdo magic key they'd found, making notes and puzzling and wrinkling his brow and yawning, just some kid who was like ten feet tall and 400 pounds of muscle and somehow also a raw nerve exposed to the elements at all times, liable to buckle in on himself at the briefest touch.

Or you know, beat someone so bad they were still in a coma and weren't predicted to wake up sooner than a week.

You know. Whatever.

Dean put on his game face and opened the door back up. "Okay," he said. "Water for you, Cheetos for me." He set the bottle down on the table and peered obviously into Sam's take out container. "You know, this stuff works best if you actually eat it."

Sam shifted in his chair. "I ate some," he said.

"Uh huh. Here." He tossed a couple of granola bars onto the stack of printed photos. "It was all they had in the vending machine. Sorry if they aren't bland enough."

Sam looked up at Dean, little smile. Genuine. "I'm sorry," he started, shaking his head. "Thanks, for this. I just-"

"I know," Dean said, rolling his eyes. "Hey man, whatever you can keep in your stomach, I'm on board for, okay? You're wasting away there."

"No I'm not," Sam shot back, making a face.

"Yes you are. You just can't tell because you're a giant."

"Shut up."

Dean pulled over the cooler to sit at the table and pretend to help. "So whatcha got? Anything?"

Sam blinked a couple of times hard, coughed, resettled. Dean made a note of it, how Sam hadn't moved since parking himself at the table, how his hands had started to shake again. How he looked like he could fall asleep any second. Sam cleared his throat.

"Uhh, yeah, actually. Okay, so get this. We know that John Dee was the last human known to have learned Enochian," Sam explained. "In one of the journal pages Kevin emailed, it says he communed with angels in order to learn their tongue. There's an oblique reference to the final serpent which I _think_ means 'apocalypse,' a mention of a book of some sort, a path to something, a key to something, a search for someone who could read it - I think you were right. John Dee was trying to find Enoch."

"To help him translate a way to stop the end of the world from some book he found?"

"Uhm. Yeah."

"Wow. An instruction book for the apocalypse. That mighta been handy."

"Yeah."

"So did he?" Dean pulled one of the open, ill-gotten library books toward him and scanned. "Find him?"

Sam shrugged. "I don't know. He vanished in 1583 and stopped keeping his journals. He travelled all over Europe and shows up again six years later."

"Dude, this guy- 'Oh thrice and four times happy,'" Dean read, affecting a terrible english accent and peeking to see Sam smile, "'the man who attains this almost copulative point in the Ternary, and rejects and removes that sombre and superfluous part of the Quaternary, the source of vague shadows.' What the hell, dude."

Sam shook his head, laughing. "Different times, man. I'm sure our books will all seem crazy to future generations."

"_Our_ books seem crazy _now_."

"Which one is that?"

Dean flipped the book closed and read the cover. "Monas Hiero... glyph...ic-"

"The Monas Hieroglyphica?" Sam said, reaching for the book.

"You don't even remember which books you took? You _are_ losing it."

"I was kinda in a hurry. I just took every call number that had John Dee in the index. Lemme see that."

"We don't have time for you to geek out, Sam," Dean said, pulling the book away from his grabby hands. "Enoch, remember?"

"Dean, the Monas Hieroglyphica is where the monad comes from."

Dean raised a brow in question.

"The _monad_," Sam said, tapping the brass symbol, "that you dug out of the floor in John Winthrop's crypt. The only thing he has in common with John Dee? The thing that can translate this?"

"Okay okay, I got it. Jeez."

Sam wrote another little note and chuckled. "Hey, listen to this: _'_With the Win' - that's gotta be Winthrop. 'With the Win, the knowledge rests until my death, whereon transfers toward the sun and obliviation, for its contents spell relief from life and all hope.' Cheery."

"Ahh, relief from life and all hope. Just what you want to hear when you find the treasure."

"Not exactly the end he imagined for his work, I guess," Sam said, shaking his head at all the pictures and scans of journal pages and Sam's own neat translation work.

"Things don't always go the way you planned," Dean agreed.

Sam pressed his lips together at his notebook. Dean was struck suddenly by the smell of a church at the end of a lane with a brother inside it who looked like he wanted nothing more than relief from life, and goddammit, things don't get to go the way you - you fucking planned that? _Tell me you didn't fucking plan that._

Sam was reading through another page from the stack Kevin had emailed, eyes moving between it and his notebook where he'd been translating. He shook his head. "Hang on."

Dean leaned over. "What."

"I said hang on."

"What is it?"

"I think... I think he was tracking some signs here... Dean." Sam looked up, brows high in his face. "I think John Dee was a hunter."

Dean got up to circle around the table and pull one of the books toward himself. "What makes you think that?"

"These notes... I think he was tracking demon signs here. I think-" Sam flipped a few pages. "I think that's some kind of European wendigo creature there."

"Wendigos are Western US, everyone knows that."

"Yeah, but conditions for wendigo-like populations exist everywhere. I think this one's Russian. Yeah, someone gets trapped out in the Russian snows and has to survive on the flesh of their own traveling companions."

Dean shook his head. None of the writing looked like a hunter's journal to him, except maybe the astrological notations, and they seemed to be more math than anything. Then- "It's in code."

Sam grinned at him, full on 100% research glow. "Yeah. The _code_ is in code. There's a cipher for it here-" He pushed the page he was working on toward Dean to show him, and ran his pencil through his own notebook at the same time. "Here's a variant of rugaru, here's a ghoul..."

"Okay. John Dee was a hunter-"

"Or a Man of Letters, I guess," Sam said, sitting back again, thoughtful.

"Or that, yeah. One of us, anyway."

Sam frowned. "Wait. Wait. Yes. He _was_ one of us. Edward Kelley."

"Who's Edward Kelley?"

Sam was pushing through the pages, angled one at Dean - because he apparently didn't notice or care that Dean wasn't looking at any of this stuff he was getting shoved at him. "He was Dee's friend, a seer."

"A seer. Like a psychic."

Sam grinned at him. _Full. On. Grinned. _And pointed out a paragraph. "Doesn't that seem more like prophet stuff to you?"

Dean frowned as he read. "John Dee was palling around with the prophet of his times?"

"Yeah, like us," Sam said. "Kelley was his Kevin Tran. Their relationship dissolved after some time," Sam said then, vacantly in that way that indicated he was connecting the dots.

"Okay. So John Dee was a hunter. We'll keep that in mind if we need his ghost to like, hunt himself or something. In the meantime- In the _meantime_," he said in the face of Sam's deflated excitement. "Got anything about the case? Like. Enoch? Remember him?"

Sam sighed. "There's a mention of a key in the monument text-"

"So mention it."

Sam rolled his eyes and read from his notebook: "_Release bindings upon which are placed these symbols_ - these symbols," Sam said. He sorted through the printouts for a certain photo and tapped it. He looked back at his notebook. "_- by use of all things which are the one thing, the sun, moon, and all elements of life, bound and destroyed by fire. Therein lies the secret of the names of those agents of evil and good, and that escapee from time and death, whose scheme shall not come to pass so long as angels remain in Heaven above."_

Sam licked his lips. "Escapee from time and death? Gotta be Enoch, right?"

Dean whistled. "Whose scheme shall not come to pass as long as angels remain in Heaven. I guess we know why Death picked now to look for him."

"Yeah, stop his 'scheme,' whatever it is, now that the angels are... You know." Sam frowned. "And this monument text probably says where Enoch's hidden away. For all we know, John Dee figured out how to bind him, since he couldn't kill him."

Dean tapped the page Sam had pushed at him. "And these seals release those binds. We find him, release the binds, deliver him to Death, and that's that."

Sam scratched at his ear. "I don't know. Maybe we just-" Sam cut himself off with a rushed exhale, squeezed his eyes shut, hand to his head migraine style, _vision_ style.

"Sam? What, is it-"

"Call Kevin." Sam breathed, dragged himself up. Blinked a few times, moisture and hitched breathing, distress. His voice cracked when he said, "_Dean_, call Kevin. It's Cas."

"Praying? Jesus, just what we need-"

"It's not _praying,_ Dean-"

"An angel says it's praying, I believe it's praying." Dean swore as he hit his speed dial #3. "How do you know it's that and not... You know who?"

"Who, Voldemort?" Sam gave him a look, like he couldn't believe Dean could be so dumb. "It's _Cas_," he said, like that explained it. At Dean's look, he shrugged and added, "It feels different."

"Well I don't know how your head works, dude. Sue me! Kevin! No, I'm not mad!" Dean took and released a breath, calmed himself. Poorly. "Kevin, where's Cas?"

"_Freaking out again. Should I wake him this time or-"_

"This time?" Dean turned to include Sam in his yelling. "This time? How many times has this happened, Sam?"

Sam shrugged. "Dean, it's-"

"_Three_," Kevin said.

"Three?!" Dean thundered.

"Kevin, dammit-"

"_Sam said it was fine before. We got him calmed down and everything was fine. But - this one seems bad._"

Dean looked over at Sam. It wasn't anything like Lucifer hallucinations or whatever. He just looked you know, like everyone he knew and loved had died. Not too far off from reality for them, really, but looking at Sam's face, you'd think it had happened yesterday, and that he'd killed them all himself, and that he might soon be crushed under the weight of guilt and grief.

So, basically, normal Sam. Except for the whole _Sam doesn't deserve this crap and can barely stand his own issues without having to shoulder an ex angel's honestly-earned guilt._

"Wake him up," Sam said. His voice dried out on the last word, and his face crumpled in despair. "He's really upset."

"Wake him up," Dean relayed. While Kevin went to comply, Dean turned on Sam. "Three times? He's praying to you in his _sleep_?"

"It's not-"

Dean shook his head. "We have to get a lid on this, Sam. This is too much for you-"

"I'm fine. Dean. It's just..." Sam spread his hands. "What he's feeling. That's all. It's not - it's not _Hell_ or something."

"I don't care if he's dreaming about puppies and lollipops and it makes you feel all warm inside, Sam! You don't want to hear this, I know. But you are going to listen to me. You are falling apart. With the trials, and this Lucifer crap - you can't afford this on top of it. _We_ can't afford it."

"What do you want me to do, Dean? I can't just-"

But then Kevin was on the phone again. "_He's really upset, still talking about his dream._"

"Put him on." Dean put his phone on speaker and set it down in the middle of the table.

"_Sam?_"

Sam shook his head, lowered his chin to his chest. He could say he was alright with it, but it sure _sounded _like he was feeling the incredible weight of the guilt of a thousand-year-old angel who had killed hundreds of his brothers and sisters, and, however indirectly, caused the rest of them to fall. Not to mention all the crap Cas had done on earth just in the brief time Dean had known him. He had a feeling that wasn't something a human melon was designed to withstand. So if Sam didn't want to talk to Cas, Dean wasn't going to make him.

"Cas, it's me," he said. He rolled his eyes as the long moment of silence passed.

"_Dean_."

"Yeah. Remember me? The handsome one."

"_I had the dream again_."

"What dream, buddy?"

Dean saw Sam's smile and rolled his eyes. Okay, sure, Cas had earned his guilt, but he was _Cas_. He was still family. So. He was allowed to be gentle with the brand new baby human. Cas hadn't even had to _sleep_ as an angel. Of course nightmares would scare him. And yelling at him some more wasn't the best way to get him calm and the fuck out of Sam's broken head, even Dean knew that. But it was hard to forget that the reason Sam was broken in the first place was that this guy Dean had _trusted_ had utterly betrayed them-

"_You and Sam left, and you were in danger-_"

"We're fine, Cas. Just go back to sleep, okay?"

"_You were in danger. The authorities were after you. And. Then they came here. They came here to Lebanon, Kansas, USA, Dean. They found the bunker and they were going to burn it down and find both of you and commit physical harm-_"

Dean frowned and looked at Sam, who met his eye. Cops? Less than a day after they'd been arrested? Less than an hour after they'd run from the surprise cop infestation in the otherwise low-security, non-descript burial grounds? Just... showing up in Cas' dream? Cas, who just happened to for whatever reason be able to get to Sam's head? Sam, who just happened to once have been psychic, and who knew if that had really disappeared when Yellow Eyes bought the farm, or if it had just gone dormant?

Sam's face had gone white and Dean knew he was thinking the same thing. He shook his head in answer to whatever question he thought Dean was asking. _Did you have a vision_ maybe. Or _is this possible?_

"I'm sure it's nothing, Cas," Dean said.

"_It isn't nothing, Dean! Where is Sam? Sam, if you're there, you must believe me. This feeling was very real. I thought I saw one of their faces in town when we went out to purchase grocery items. He may have helped me find a suitable unit of bananas. Sam?_"

Dean looked at Sam. His eyes were red-rimmed, Dean noticed now. He'd seemed better, trials-wise, but Dean knew it was an act, or the result of whatever - _whatever _- he was chugging when he thought Dean was asleep. Either way, kid was wrecked and they didn't have time to worry about this -

"We'll be home tomorrow," Sam said. "We'll head out tonight. Don't worry, Cas."

"And for the love of whoever, stop _praying_." Dean ended the call without waiting for a response from Cas. But he turned on Sam. "What the hell?"

Sam was already shuffling his work into a stack, sorting pages into whatever order he'd concocted. "We're going home. Cas isn't going to be able to deal with this cop thing on his own."

"We don't know there's a cop thing."

"And we want to take the chance that for once something _isn't_ about to go terribly wrong for us because...?"

"Because we aren't done here, Sam. We've got work to do."

Sam paperclipped his work together and closed the laptop. As he loaded up his satchel, he said, "Work? This isn't work. We aren't fighting monsters here. People aren't dying, Dean."

"Nobody but you, forget that? Come on, Sam-"

"What we have is just going to have to do. I'll poke at it some more on the drive home. We'll do more of the brain work once we get back to our library." He shook his head. "We have to have some realistic priorities, Dean."

"_You_ are the priority-"

"Only to you. Okay? We have people counting on us back home. Death is just going to have to take what we give him, and if it's not enough, then..." He shrugged. "We did our best. That's all."

Dean surged forward and grabbed Sam by the arm to spin him, to _force_ him to pay some goddamned attention. "Listen, Sam. I figured out a while ago that you don't actually care about getting this done, and we're gonna talk about that later, a nice long fucking heart to heart, okay, but I was _counting_ on you not to half-ass this. I was _counting on you_, Sam!"

Sam pulled out of Dean's grip. "Dean, I'm not giving up. I really think we might have enough. Maybe the answer's here and Death can work it out. I really think he likes us. He might, you know-"

"What," Dean said, incredulous. "Do us a solid? This is business, Sam. We have to have something to offer."

"We do," Sam said. He stuffed his gun into the back of his jeans and then zipped up his duffle, setting it onto the bed neatly next to his satchel. He started in on the rest of the "borrowed" library books, stacking them into his backpack. "This research, and this key. The answer is in here."

"No, Sam-"

Sam turned to him. "I have the keys to the car. I'm packing up. I'm leaving. You gonna let me go alone? You _know_." He blinked fast and looked away, like just _saying_ it was a risk. "You know what will happen. If you let me go alone." Sam's composure, mostly good up to then, broke, just a little. Dean thought it was a calculated break, but it worked even knowing that. Sam's head tilted, he took this breath through his teeth. He _looked_ at Dean, with his _face._

"I need you with me. It's better when you're with me."

Dean growled. Sam's goddammed stupid face. His stupid goddammed _need_, but Sam was right, and it wasn't like Dean was going to knock him out and take the keys from him, not with his head just begging to bust at the slightest provocation. So, fine. There was a chance Sam was right about the answer being in the research they'd already gotten. But if Sam thought he was going to get to sleep the whole trip again, he was in for a rude awakening, because even if it meant neither of them slept for days, they were going to find the answer and _make_ Death help them.

"Fine. Fine. You're an asshole, you know that?" Dean stormed around the motel room, picking up his stuff and tossing it onto his bed to shove it all into his duffle, grumbling.

Sam had the nerve to _laugh_ at him as he started packing up the rest of his crap into the backpack.

Dean turned on him, livid, mouth open, because damned if he was going to put up with this attitude he couldn't understand, this ability to laugh at something like getting his own way when Sam's actual _life_ was in the balance, how could he not _care_ about that-

But -

Sam put his hand onto the key to pack it away, and froze. And his head lowered, and his jaw went just a little slack, and Dean recognized it, and _fuck_.

"Sam?"

"Can't let you leave."

Dean frowned. "John Winthrop?"

"My dutiful student."

"John Dee. Shit. I thought you were in England!"

"Can't let you leave."

"Yeah, you said that," Dean said, circling around to the bag he hadn't yet fully packed. Where the shotgun was, and the salt, and goddammit, he couldn't shoot Sammy. Sam couldn't even shake a case of the sniffles right now. A chest full of salt could be deadly. "Listen, could you get out of my brother?"

Sam turned toward Dean. His face was slack. Without Sam's animated expressions, he looked like he was dying, pale and thin and - god, Dean had thought _pale and thin_ before, but he'd had no idea. Sam lifted a hand, awkward. He was a puppet. Ghosts had a harder time possessing than demons did. Dean tried to think - if he was only just now trying to possess someone, it had to have been because something they'd done had pissed him off enough to use that precious spectral energy.

Sam had just convinced Dean to stop working on the case. To go home and hand it all over the Death. John Dee didn't want Death to have it? John Dee wanted Sam and Dean to find something? Maybe something about the apocalypse he'd tried and succeeded to avoid?

"You want us to keep working?" Dean said, one hand out, waiting for an opening. He hadn't worked out the whole plan aside from get ghost out of Sam, but a step one was better than nothing. "We will. I promise. But you gotta go to the other side."

Sam's head shook once, a frantic movement made by a thing that didn't quite know how to work Sam's body. "Can't go. Key."

John Dee's _ghost_ was the key. His friggin' _ghost_ was what made the crap glow. Which meant the thing Sam was holding was what kept him there, and even if they could gank the ghost itself without destroying the brass thing, that'd just make it useless. Which meant Dean couldn't just melt it down, not if he wanted to be able to give Death a key that actually worked, or, if he got _his_ way, use it to keep working the problem and have an actual bargaining chip when the big guy came calling.

Either way, crap.

"Okay. We'll keep working. But you gotta get out of my brother. He isn't-"

Sam's hand went to his nose. Dean thought - _ectoplasm_, but Sam's hand came away red, and crap crap crap.

"Who is your brother?" John Dee asked.

"Sam. He's Sam, and he's not doing very well right now, as you can see, so we'll keep looking, whatever you want, but-"

"Who are the others?"

Dean frowned. "What?"

"Who are the others?"

Who are the others... in Sam's head? Lucifer, and Cas maybe. Along with Sam. And now John Dee. Clearly it was too much for Sam's noggin, because blood came trickling down from his nose in a sudden thick dark stripe and Dean's heart seized up.

"You must discover their true names."

"Those guys? We know 'em already-"

"No."

"Well whose then? We will, I swear to god, but-"

"The Wise Men. The doers of Good and Evil. You must. You are on the path." Sam's face actually showed an emotion then, as the ghost of John Dee beseeched Dean to pursue whatever his own unfinished business was that kept him tied to earth. "You must get off the path!"

"Yeah, yeah whatever, we will-"

And then Sam's face twisted in agony, and Sam cried out and dropped to his knees, and he was heaving on the floor, falling forward onto his hands.

* * *

Sam could hear him, could hear Dean, from within the dark warm close vast empty thing that was his own mind where he was trapped. A ringing, echoing estate where nothing could live or flourish, where nothing grew or breathed.

Without sense, it felt just like - no time, no up no down, no dark no light - just like the _Cage_, and he forced himself to feel over the word, in case it could give him the urgency to overpower this thing inside him, get his body back. It might have worked, he didn't know yet. First, the panic, the nausea and that sense that this wasn't _right_ it wasn't _real and no matter what, no matter what, there was always going to be more of him down there than there was up here, even if it was real and he was free, even then. Was he even Dean's brother? That voice that begged somewhere in the distance. Was he even Dean's real brother? If he had spent so much more time listening to Lucifer try to soothe him, calm him, between the torments, what claim could he even have on Dean anymore? Centuries of Lucifer, versus thirty years of Dean, the last several of which had been some grudging aftereffect of - some photographic afterimage of the love that had once been between them like a tether a measure of safety, now barbed wire chain, binding them together whether Dean wanted it or not._

Ah, ah... Don't go there, Sammy. We spent so much time unwinding that.

No no no shining white he could feel burn through him cold and how was it too much when he didn't have senses? But it was, it was too much, and he screamed, but nothing happened, nothing, and he couldn't claw his way out of this nothing -

- inside him. This nothing was inside him, remember that, Jesus don't forget that. You're _you_, inside _you_. And someone else has wedged you down into a crevice, a rough thing that doesn't love you has stuck you down into this broken glass soul _that's yours too_ and you need _out_.

Because Dean's out there. Or your brother's out there. Whoever your brother is. A rough unloving stranger is out there with him.

"Who is your brother?"

_I don't know, I don't know. The one who loves me, that's him._

And then the voice - it was his own, he realized belatedly - it turned inward, this thing inside him, taking stock, knowing him, sorting through him, reeling back in revulsion at what it found, muttering _the path, the path_ -

"Sam, he's Sam-" Dean's voice.

_Sam, I'm Sam, please, get out -_

Don't go, Sammy. It's nice here with you.

_-the cold the cold strange geometry no, this wasn't that it wasn't that, this was _him_, his._

And then warmth, the heat, like. Like coals, like sun, a rushing roar that echoed through him oh like terror but it was loving, it was a prayer. At least there was that. But the inward voice, that rough stranger, tore through them all and:

"Who are the others?"

The others, the others, everyone who'd ever gotten their claws into his head. He could even feel Meg scraping around him, what was left of her, just a memory, like that depraved doctor in that old asylum, like that siren's song, like everything else, just memories-

_Not everything, Sammy._

Too much, too much. The burning, the coals, the cold, the rush, the rough stranger- a sudden shrieking gush of neural fire, but the rough stranger turned outward, and the heat gave Sam energy and Lucifer wanted him to himself, and with their help, Sam clawed out with everything, that pain, that ache, that desperation. The ship was going down, every part of the nothing around them was breaking, but he couldn't leave that rough stranger out there with whoever loved him, not for a moment longer. Even if it killed him-

_He couldn't leave that stranger with Dean._

And then Sam's face twisted in agony, and Sam cried out and dropped to his knees, and he was heaving on the floor, falling forward onto his hands.

* * *

Dean rushed to him, fell on the floor in front of him, but Sam wasn't gasping in relief and Sam wasn't relaxing into the exhaustion that normally followed dispossession.

"He's still here," he eeked out, breathing hard, fast.

"Dude." Dean pulled Sam up by the shoulders of his coat and crushed him to his chest desperately. Sam shook with the effort of keeping control and leaned his forehead onto Dean's shoulder. Dean dialed his phone, speed dial 3.

"Dean," Sam said. "I don't-"

"You got this, man," Dean said. "You overpowered _Satan_. You definitely got this. Just hold on, and I'll figure out the rest." He waited until he felt Sam nod jerkily into his neck and then he laid Sam back onto the floor. "Chill out there, okay? I'll be right back."

"Dean, salt-" Sam cut himself off, and his head slammed back into the ratty motel room carpet and his back arched and he was seizing.

Fuck fuck fuck. Dean scrambled to his bag for the can of salt just as the knocking on their motel room door started. They'd been loud. Some asshole was probably ready to bitch them out for interrupting their precious beauty sleep.

"Gettin' some complaints. You boys okay in there?"

Or... the polite dude who manned the motel office and looked like he probably spent his youth saving kittens from trees. Whatever. Dean held the phone to his ear with his shoulder and dug out a handful of salt just as Kevin picked up.

"Kevin. Wake Cas the fuck up right now and calm him down. Get him out of Sam's head asap." He lunged for Sam's seizing body and shoved his hand, full of salt, over Sam's mouth. "Because it's a matter of life and death!" He threw the phone away in favor of holding Sam down with both arms as he thrashed, and then the door to their room opened, and the street light held a long shadow of their kind but portly motel office manager, who yelled and hooked Dean under the armpits to drag him off his brother, caught in the middle of what probably looked like a really weird murder attempt.

"Back off man, this isn't what it looks like!" Dean said, struggling to get back to Sam.

Sam lay limp for a moment, face bloodied from the strain of holding four different consciousnesses, but it seemed like at least the salt had worked. He coughed on salt and blood, Dean could see the pink froth fly into the air, and Sam started to stir.

But the motel manager had Dean in some kind of hold and Dean thought, maybe that saving kittens vibe had actually been more of a saving countries vibe - ex-marine? Either way, the guy held him back from checking on Sam and was pulling out his own phone to call the police, _just great_ - Dean twisted in his grip, trying to argue that it wasn't what it looked like -

And then Sam was on his feet and hurtling toward them, and Dean was shoved aside _hard_ into the dresser. He watched dazed as Sam -

- tackled the motel manager into the door and they both went down, and Sam was straddling the guy, beating his fist into the motel manager's face over and over, making a mess of him, an absolute mess, and -

- Dean picked himself up and tried to drag Sam off, but Sam was saying, "You don't touch my brother! You don't fucking touch my brother, you bastard! Do you hear me!" And Dean had to practically choke him out to be able to drag him away, and in the end had to dig his own fingers into the stitches he'd just done up on Sam's forearm earlier that night. Sam went more or less limp in Dean's arms, and Dean arranged him onto the floor before going back to take stock of the motel manager's injuries. Shit. Shit.

Another man Sam might have just put into a coma, right here. And three guesses as to who _you bastard_ referred to. The only person still left in Sam's head when John Dee and Cas had been evicted. Shit.

"Okay, guy. You're okay," Dean muttered, checking the motel manager's pupils and nose and neck. Yeah, sure, the guy would be okay, he thought. Broken this, fractured that, but okay. "Sam-"

Dean turned from the motel manager on the floor to Sam, who had dragged himself to the far wall where he huddled, looking at his hands.

Sam looked up at him then, tears running freely down his face. He looked like he'd looked when he'd made his first kill, terror and guilt. There had been blood on his shaking hands then, too. Sam's eyes lingered on the motel manager's still form, and he shook his head.

"No."

"Sammy, it's okay. He's okay."

"No. I didn't do this for you." Sam made a token move to get up, but he stopped on his knees. Looked at Dean, then at the motel manager, shook his head again. Pulled the gun from the back of his jeans. Lifted it to his temple. Looked Dean in the eye with an apology on his lips. "You're not my brother."

There was no way to fix it.

There was no way to fix _Sam_.

Time moved slow for Dean. He saw Sam shaking his head so hopelessly, and he lunged for his own phone, hit what he had programmed in as speed dial 4. Saw Sam reaching for his gun, heard the call connect. Saw Sam drag the barrel up to his head speaking nonsense _nonsense goddammit_, yelled into the phone:

"Now, come _now!_"

The room disappeared.

* * *

Dean was on his knees on a white floor. As far as he could see, nothing but white. "What the hell?"

"You rang?"

Dean spun around and jumped to his feet in one movement. He had no weapon, again, but he found himself facing Death again, so it didn't matter. Again.

"Yeah. Fix him. Now."

"I presume you have something for me."

"Yeah, we got something for you. And it's gonna have to be enough. Because whatever you got us into, it put FBI on our tail and some goddamn ghost in Sam's head and between everything happening all at once, he's gone, he's just - gone."

"I did warn you Enoch had protection-"

"Please. I am _begging_ you. Take what we have, and just. Fix it." God please, Sam be right. Be right - what they had was enough, Death liked them, _whatever_, just please-

Death watched him a moment, sizing him up, maybe simultaneously doing his Deathly hoodoo to surf through what they'd discovered without having to move a muscle, but he finally sighed, long-suffering. "What did you have in mind?"

_Yes_. Dean tried not to look too excited. He had a plan B, but it never hurt to just _try_ plan A. "Another wall?"

Death shrugged. "Sorry, Dean. I wasn't just being a vindictive shrew when I said one wall per. There's literally nothing left to build from in there."

Dean nodded, like that was what he'd expected. "Then I need you to be straight with me. I know you have power. You're older than basically everything."

"Older than God, even."

"More powerful?"

"That depends upon what one considers to be 'power.'" Death leaned both hands on his walking stick and watched Dean.

"Whatever," Dean said. "Call in a favor if you have to."

"I sense you're about to ask for something dramatic."

Dean steeled himself. He wasn't gonna take no for an answer. "Well," he said. "I don't really _do_ boring, so."

Death grinned.

END

**Next time, on **_**Supernatural**_**:**

Death makes good on the deal he made with Dean, and grants Dean's request to fix Sam. Death doesn't do loopholes and he doesn't play around with trickery; Dean gets exactly what he asked for, but it isn't quite what he bargained for.


End file.
